Unforgiving Years

I. The Secret Agent

AROUND seven in the morning, D personally loaded his two suitcases into the taxi. The street was still slumbering, tinged by the bleak whiteness of a Paris awakening. No one was about except for a milkman. Morning purity of cobbles and asphalt. The garbage cans were empty. D felt no suspicions. He had himself driven to the Gare du Nord, grew irritable at the station buffet because they made him wait for a tasteless cup of coffee, and piled his luggage into another cab which dropped him off in the place d’Iéna. Sure of not being followed, he took in the vast square, a stage set empty of actors, bathed in a dappled light under which one would wish to live for a long while, meditating. Before eight in the morning Paris, in her wealthier neighborhoods, seems delivered from herself; pacified, she is nothing more than a work of human wisdom. D found a chauffeurs’ bar where he was served a good, unpretentious coffee and two hot croissants, reminding him of that young condemned man whose sole last request was for croissants, which he could not have, because it was too early. “Just my luck!” said the pale young man, and he was right, for in fact the only thing he ever succeeded in was his own death by decapitation… Before boarding a third cab, which he had to call for, D reflected that all these complex precautions, reasonable as they might appear, were actually a semi-lunatic’s game. They left the path of danger studded with small markers, perhaps even with milestones. How easily he might have been seen, quite by chance, without realizing, at the Gare du Nord or in the vicinity of the place d’Iéna. Someone could have jotted down a license plate. The business of changing from one taxi to another might attract attention itself. If you took all these possibilities into account, you’d go right over the edge. This time he had himself driven directly to the hotel in the rue de Rochechouart. It was a middle-class establishment of the sort frequented by traveling salesmen, tourists on a modest budget, sedately adulterous couples, and well-behaved musicians with nightclub contracts. “Ah, Monsieur Lamberti,” the porter greeted him. D corrected him firmly, the better to steep himself in his new persona: “It’s Battisti, Bruno Battisti.” “Room 17, wasn’t it?” inquired the porter, who knew perfectly well. Inside the room, D checked the locks on the suitcases even though he knew he’d closed them securely. By nine, he was back “home.” The concierge met him with a “Morning, Monsieur Malinesco! And me thinking you were gone on a trip!” (So you saw me with my luggage, you old witch!) “Quite so, Madame, I shall be away for six weeks.” (For all eternity, Madame!) “Well, it’s nice weather for you anyway, Monsieur Malinesco,” said the concierge, because you should always say something pleasant.

Mademoiselle Armande turned up promptly at ten, being an odiously punctual person who had been known to loiter in the street with an eye on her wristwatch, or stand for thirty seconds on the landing before knocking. She entered the study through the door left half open and murmured, “Monsieur Malinesco,” the words more snuffled than pronounced, accompanied by a deferential bob of the head. She was an insipid woman, rather on the homely side, pink-complexioned and dressed in neutral colors, who wore large shiny spectacles over the face of a wizened, calculating child. D watched her with concealed attention. What did she know about him? That he was rich (he who had never owned anything), and she respected rich people. A philatelist, a bibliophile, a lover of ancient art, liable to jump on a train or into a car and scour Brittany in winter just to bring back an antique dresser… Friendly with artists. Her job was to answer the telephone, write the occasional letter, visit the bank, and receive Monsieur Soga, the embassy attaché, a nervous little man who reeked of cologne; Monsieur Sixte Mougin, the antiques dealer; Monsieur Kehl from the Philatelist Society; and, more rarely, Monsieur Alain, who didn’t much look like a painter. She was becoming a connoisseur of postage stamps and even did a little collecting herself, only the French colonies, not to be extravagant. It’s a highly regarded hobby; they say the King of England has built up a remarkable collection. D had Mademoiselle Armande periodically tailed by a detective. She stepped out on Saturday nights with Monsieur Dupois, a civil servant at the Ministry of Education; they went to the pictures; Dupois’s concierge referred to Mademoiselle Armande as “the lady engaged to that nice gentleman who has been so unfortunate…” D, who distrusted other people’s misfortunes even more than his own, set the detective onto Monsieur Evariste Dupois, age forty-seven, owner of a property at Ivry, divorced… A gentleman who bet judiciously on the horses, bought a weekly lottery ticket, read the right-wing press, and visited a brothel in the rue Saint-Sauveur every Friday evening. An innocent man.

“Are you engaged, then?” inquired D of Mademoiselle Armande.

She did not flinch, being no doubt incapable of such a lively reaction, but her fingers twitched a little.

“Dear me, Monsieur Malinesco… However did you know?”

He saw that her complexion was improved by embarrassment.

“Just a coincidence, Mademoiselle. I happened to see you one Saturday on the arm of your fiancé.”

“It has not been completely decided yet,” she said reticently.

Innocent, innocent! (But that was not a wholly rational conclusion…)

“I intend to go away for six weeks. You will please pass on the mail to Monsieur Mougin.”

If anybody was going to look miserable as a drowned rat in a bucket three days from now, it was definitely Monsieur Sixte Mougin! D regretted the atrophied state of his sense of humor; it would have cheered him up no end to dwell on the troubles of that quavering, servile bastard Monsieur Sixte Mougin.

“When Monsieur Soga calls, tell him I’m in Strasbourg.”

Strasbourg was code for “unforeseen complications.”

Mademoiselle Armande did not turn a hair. No one suspected anything. Unbelievable that They hadn’t moved to place me under internal surveillance months ago! But if the unbelievable were not sometimes a reality, there would be no possibility of struggle. In cramped italics, the secretary was scratching into her diary: “Monsieur Soga. Say Strasbourg…” D, who disliked things to be written down, forced a smile.

“You don’t have much faith in your memory, I see!”

“Oh I do, but it’s funny, I always mix up the names of towns like Edinburgh, Hamburg, Strasbourg, Mulhouse…”

He hadn’t expected that. His throat went instantly dry. In the same code, known to just five people, Mulhouse meant “watch out.”

“And why is that?”

“I’ve no idea, for the life of me! Look, I nearly wrote Mulhouse just now, I can’t help it.”

“I might go to Mulhouse as well,” D said moodily.

He was fixing her with the cold, hard, stony-eyed glare she seldom caught from him — not the look of an art lover. Mademoiselle Armande put on a falsely bright smile, while D rapidly weighed the pros and cons.

“Here’s the key to the bottom right-hand drawer of the small cabinet in the hall. Fetch me the Zürich folder, Monsieur Feuvre, you know, the Swiss collection… The files are not in order, you’ll have to rummage.”

“Yes, Monsieur.”

Naturally, she left her handbag sitting next to the typewriter. D opened it with an unhurried dexterity acquired in the mail-interception department of the Secret Service. He scanned a note signed “Your fondly affectionate, Evariste.” Leafed through the address book. Saw — sickeningly — a telephone number: X 11-47. The number to fear was 11-74. Numeric inversion! Inside his head suspicion exploded into certainty. The returning Mademoiselle Armande glanced at her bag — ah, so we understand each other! D selected a letter from Monsieur Feuvre and put it in his pocket. “Will you kindly put the folder back in the file…” But he took back the keys to the cabinet, and she didn’t ask for them… Right, then; we thoroughly understand each other, thought D. This changed everything. He remembered finding his first taxicab parked and available only a few steps from the house, and how the driver had leaned toward him in a peculiarly obsequious manner… Soon as I leave here, she’ll call 11-74 — or another number, just around the corner perhaps, or in this very building… Made-moiselle Armande, clearly flustered, was struggling to surmount some hesitation or inhibition.

“What’s the matter?” D demanded unceremoniously.

She explained that in Monsieur Malinesco’s absence she would dearly like to take three days off, if that were at all possible, in order to… A matter of an aunt, a small property in the country, Monsieur Dupois. A notary’s letter fluttered out of the handbag.

“But of course,” he stopped her.

The worst of it was the need to distrust himself, to suspect his own suspicions. D saw the number 11-47 printed on the legal letterhead. Reassured, he stopped fretting over Mulhouse. “In addition, you must allow me to offer you a bonus of 500 francs for the last quarter…” You can assess the degree of corruptibility by the way a person accepts money. The sparkle in the young woman’s spectacles was one of innocence.

Just as a magician believes in his little tricks, so D believed in secrets, ciphers, stratagems, silence, masks, and in playing the game impeccably; at the same time he knew very well that secrets are sold, codes deciphered, stratagems outwitted, and silences broken; that masks are easier to read than faces, that the carbon copies of dispatches lie in ministerial wastepaper baskets for the taking, and that the perfect game does not exist. He believed the Organization to be infallible by virtue of its stability, its ramifications, its resources, its power, its single-minded commitment — even by the complicity of its opponents, who feed it, sometimes involuntarily, sometimes as a deliberate ploy. But from the day he had begun to pull away from the Organization, he felt himself rejected by it; and its power behind him, within him, became stifling.

His inner break with the Organization dated back to when the Crime had been revealed. The Crime had burst into view after a long, stealthy approach, like a sinister squadron on the ocean suddenly lighted by searchlights. D had cried out silently to himself, one night, over the newspapers scattered across the rug: “I can’t go on! This is the end of everything!” And nothing meant anything to him any longer in this stupidly snug apartment, where the play-acting only let up after hours — when he could hunch forward in the armchair with the chessboard set up and solve problems, which he inevitably did, since problems are given away in advance, you just have to keep looking, all problems are hollow in the end. Or at night, cozily in bed under cozy lamplight, a glass of lemon water by his elbow, reading a work of physics, since the structure of the atom is probably the only problem left in the universe and they will solve it; then the age of despair will begin. Such mental exercises calmed him but failed to relax him. There is no real peace for those who understand the mechanics of a world moving toward cataclysms, lurching from one cataclysm to the next.

He bid a discreet farewell to the secretary. “Have a nice trip, Monsieur Malinesco… Count on me… They say Strasbourg is a beautiful city…” The ghost of a smile curled the man’s wrinkled face as he teased, circumspect even in laughter, “What’s a beautiful city, Mulhouse?” Mademoiselle Armande was mortified. “Oh, you must think me a child…” “Never that!” he said, and meant it. “I trust that when I return, you’ll be announcing the publication of the banns.” “I might indeed, Monsieur…” she said, with such a glow in her eyes that D felt a twinge of pity. (“When I return — meaning never…”)

How many times have I closed a door behind me, never to return! This time… On the landing, he took a deep breath. The salt sea air could not have been more bracing than this first breath on stepping into the unknown, a relief without joy, indeed mixed with foreboding… Once the unendurable burden has been shed, the back straightens. Glad to have proven equal to the task so far, D reckoned he had at least a forty-eight-hour start on his pursuers. The elevator was moving. He ran down a few steps and stopped short, listening. Someone was mounting the stairs with a heavy, spongy tread he thought he recognized…

This someone was in too much of a hurry to wait for the elevator to come back down. D leaned cautiously out over the stairwell and saw, two floors below, Monsieur Sixte Mougin’s plump gray hand alighting on the banister. Fugitives have instant reflex. D raced up to the fifth floor on tiptoe while his mind rattled off calculations like a crack marksman. The mind can come alive intensely in a few seconds when it engages life without emotion, while the heart beats calmly on, accustomed to the unexpected. A forty-eight-hour start on danger, eh? Not even one, my friend. You’re more like twelve to fourteen hours behind. Old Mougin’s here because they sent him. My message, left yesterday, wasn’t supposed to be delivered in Amsterdam until the morning of the day after tomorrow. I hadn’t foreseen that disinformation could work against me too, that I could forfeit the leadership’s confidence, that the special envoy could have been lying about that invitation to a meeting in Holland — or that he could have given someone else leave to open letters in his absence, those letters no one can open on pain of death… Monsieur Mougin was pressing the doorbell one floor below. Such was the silence around the mechanical hiss of the elevator, D could hear the useful rogue wheezing. The door opened, and clicked shut behind him. The street outside might already be one long trip wire, invisibly hooked up to a dozen traps. D moved the Browning from his trouser pocket to that of his coat: a laughable precaution. He entered the elevator. Inside the mahogany cabin, he deliberately turned his back on the mirror, haunted by the image of a double agent he had once escorted in the elevator of the secret prison: a handsome man with a seducer’s mustache, undone, who was promptly shot. The image of this banal face, cremated into nothing years ago, gave way to a sardonic but highly disquieting idea. What if the mad finger of suspicion had lit on Krantz, the special envoy? In that case a new man, a super-special envoy, would be opening his mail… We live in lunatic times, I shall cut through the lunacy! With this thought D leaped into the street, taking it in in both directions with one glance.

A gray Citröen stood parked and unoccupied in front of number 15. A young cyclist was starting off slowly, with a small yellow parcel dangling from the handlebars — maybe a signal. If he looks at me, that would mean… He doesn’t look, but then perhaps he’s already spotted me and he’s too well trained… A woman slackened her pace, opposite, fumbling in her handbag for something: a good way to survey the street in a pocket mirror. A green van rounded the corner of the rue de Sèvres and made a three-point turn, as though the driver wished to save himself the bother of a slight detour… Everything seemed at once unremarkable and suspect. D opted to make his way past the empty Citröen.

Nobody followed him down into the Métro. Nobody caught his attention in the first-class carriage. The warren of passages in the Saint-Lazare station lend themselves to dodging and doubling back, to abrupt corrections of deliberate mistakes… D changed direction several times. A brassy blonde wheeled around, flashing a pink-gummed grin in his face. “Do you mind!” D said irritably. It was just afterward that he realized how comical he looked, with his collar up and his overcoat grotesquely buttoned up crooked. He lit a cigarette and strolled into the railway station. Not a good idea: stations make for unexpected encounters. Sure enough here came Alain through the crowd, as though rushing out from behind a newspaper-stall display.

“It’s you!” Alain exclaimed, full of joyful surprise.

His face was frank, his eyes more alert than intelligent, his movements vigorous like those of someone used to success; D liked him, to whatever atrophied extent he was still capable of friendship. Alain was an exemplary agent, enterprising, prudent, and selfless, who owed to D his initiation into the job, that is, into the devotion that fills to the brim the cup of existence. So far, D had trusted him with only moderately risky missions, such as meeting minor functionaries or party militants who were embedded in arsenals and shipyards. In the old days, before the nightmare that had made a taciturn man out of him, D used to enjoy inviting Alain and his wife to dinner at a good restaurant. They discussed painting, theory, the news. Alain didn’t mind asking questions and D enjoyed teaching him without appearing to do so. It probably did him more good than it did to that cultivated but still rudimentary young mind.

“And you?” asked D.

“Swimmingly. In ten days, I’ll have some interesting stuff for you. You’ll be pleased.”

“And me,” thought D, “I’m rudimentary, too… It took a whole historical epoch to mold me. At twenty-five I was just like him, minus the handsome face for charming the girls…”

“Walk with me, Alain. I’m so glad I ran into you.”

They went up the rue de Rome to the place de l’Europe, the traffic circle suspended high over the railroad tracks. Under the fine drizzle which now began to fall, the great airy intersection, true to its name, drew together arteries named for all the European capitals, arteries inseparable yet foreign to one another… “Here will do fine,” said D. Soft explosions of white vapor billowed up from the station. Paris’s pallor was serene. They stopped.

“We won’t be seeing each other anymore, Alain. Someone will contact you. You’ll receive instructions.”

D watched a nascent anxiety contract the young brown eyes.

“Yes, that’s how it is. I’m saying goodbye.”

“I don’t get it,” said Alain. “Listen… You have confidence in me. You can say a word, just a word. Has something happened? Something dangerous? Are you…”

Fear was pricking Alain, the kind of fear D knew the best (there are so many different kinds!): the fear of guessing right, the fear of confronting, of understanding, the incomprehensible…

“A suspect? No. I am the same person. I’m leaving. It’s finished for me, that’s all.”

“But that’s impossible!” the young man said in a very low voice.

Further words appeared to quiver on his lips, but were held back.

“I resigned,” said D sharply. “You’re to carry on under someone else.”

He was conducting an experiment on the boy, while operating alive on himself. Putting friendship to the test by a display of futile bravado. D became aware — odd, for such sentiments ought to have died out in him — of a wish to be understood. After all, he had shaped this youth’s very soul; Alain couldn’t fail to see that if he, D, was bailing out, if D himself couldn’t go along any longer, if even D was giving it up, then serious things must be happening which finally should be condemned. A man’s conscience is secondary in the battle for such a great cause — but now it’s essential. You cast off your whole life, you “drop” the Secret Service, you say no. I who am alone, disarmed, faithful after twenty years’ labor, today I say: No. The situation must be terribly grim for me to have arrived at that conclusion.

D opens his leather cigarette case. Cyclists flit across the square like mosquitoes, human mosquitoes. They know nothing of these problems. An engine puffs below street level. Autumn seeps into the marrow, as needling as the rain. Alain is bareheaded.

“You’ll catch cold, Alain,” D says affectionately. “Let’s go our ways. Goodbye.”

But he is watching. The young face has gone pale and looks sick, even nasty. If a woman flung back at him: “Go away, I love someone else!” he might be similarly dumbfounded. Alain sees D through a dull, disfiguring space. He sees a wrinkled old face, flesh wasting away so that the skull shines through. A death’s-head pretending to be alive. You don’t quit! You run away and you are hunted down and you are finished off, justly, because running away is treason.

“I didn’t expect this from you,” Alain murmurs.

His tone changes. Rising disappointment verging on contempt, growing almost insulting. Some of the color returns to his cheeks. He blurts out: “You know better than I do that…”

(The old spool unwinds by itself: that every apparently abominable deed perpetrated corresponds to a necessity, since they are perpetrated; that the Party, steered by supremely capable hands, stands above whatever it does; that if we start to doubt we’re doomed; that those who are killed are traitors, since they are killed — that YOU YOURSELF taught me all this! D understands the precision of these exact and unalterable formulas that could not be worded any other way, as though a machine were punching them out of metal. Against them he opposes, deep inside, nothing but a stony NO of liberation, a liberation difficult to justify. His shake of the head is barely perceptible; the confident, superior smirk he puts on comes out as a grimace. Isn’t this boy going to remember all that I have meant to him, the bits of my past I have shared, the person I am?)

Alain doesn’t know what to do with his hands. The right worries a button on his mackintosh. He’s stunned. Take him by the arm, look him straight in the eye, no holding back, say: “Take it easy, kid. I haven’t changed in any way. I’ve understood, I’ve made a judgment, it’s because I’ll never change that I can no longer bear what is happening. So many corpses, so many lies, so much poison brusquely poured into our souls, into our very souls, do you understand! Forgive me for using such a mystical term…” This is only a fleeting impulse for D. It’s not possible, he knows that. It’s always rash to be too human…

“You’re going to tear off that button, Alain.”

The young man’s distress spreads across his face in a madman’s grin.

“You are a…”

He breaks off and marches jerkily away, as though willing himself not to run. So, he couldn’t quite bring himself to say the word “traitor.” Was that because of a regret? A doubt? The smallest sense of what that word’s iniquitous, unbelievable implication would be?

“I don’t care,” D answers himself. “He’s a good sort, that boy. Perhaps he’ll understand too, when it’s too late. More likely he’ll be devoured a long time before. He’s the kind who believe with their eyes closed, obey, then take the rap and languish for years in the exercise yards of penitentiaries. After that the Service is in a bind about what to do with them, pay them, earn their silence, or eliminate them… In the future they won’t be dispatched to Mexico or Argentina, but to the great beyond. Much safer. Alain, just for having known me…

But let’s put this at a distance. I didn’t want this farewell. Alain is an enemy now. When he gets over the shock, he’ll be sorry he didn’t act sympathetic — who knows? — his old respectful understanding, just to keep contact. I would have believed in his youth, his concern. He would have led me into a trap. Rule: Trust nobody this side of heaven. Since those who were deserving of all our faith are dead. Defiled and dead. And when all is said and done, we did this to ourselves.

D cast a despairing glance over the place de l’Europe. The rain was falling softly.

This was no weather for visiting the Bois, but he had time to kill before his painful three o’clock rendezvous. He wasn’t hungry. There must be some direct link between physiology and psychology. But he was thirsty for the sight of trees, water, solitary places; the ideal would be a great sweep of young green saplings and faroff mountains, crisscrossed by birds in flight, scoured by monotonous winds, warmed by a tepid sun, one of those Siberian landscapes that lends a fresh alacrity to sadness (provided you’re not in captivity). And you know that a few hours’ trek would bring you to the banks of the Irtysh, sluggish river, vision of a vast, purposeless destiny… “To the Bois de Boulogne, driver, and there’s no rush.”

The ancient taxicab listed to the left. D found himself rocking along inside a grimy, leather-lined compartment. He rolled down both windows so as to breathe in the rain… The Bois was gingery gray, ash-mauve in its feathery depths, strewn with dead leaves. A spectacle of decline, perfect for today. The tar paths, the clearings between the groves of trees, the smooth surface of the lakes like a blend of sky and mud rolled past in a stately neglect that was neither truly alive nor truly lifeless. “Slower, please, driver…”

D rested. A future resembling these paths. Wanting nothing, expecting nothing, fearing nothing. Belonging to nothing, not even to oneself. No longer holding fast to anything. No longer to be that thinking molecule within a formidable, relentless, clear-sighted collectivity, held taut by so much willpower that it no longer knew what it was doing. Am I that discouraged? I’m turning into a character out of a novel for intellectuals… Everything is falling away from me, everything: the commanding ideas, the Party, the State, the new world under construction, the hard struggles of men and women caught (much as in this chilly wood) like soldiers on the front lines under fire, taking shelter in the trenches, stubborn and exhausted, at war despite themselves for the sake of hope. And the hope betrayed! The streets of the one true capital of the world churning beneath scaffoldings and gridded blocks of broad glass panes, each cell of the concrete hive housing undernourished beings imprisoned by a prodigious destiny (and forty percent parasitic paper-shuffling). Capital of torture! The microphotography labs, the special training schools, the dungeons of the secret prison vibrating with the subway trains, the cryptography departments, the central Power. The place of execution, a solidly reinforced cellar no doubt, thoroughly hosed down, rationalized, into which so many men have descended, suddenly realizing the annihilation of everything: faith, reason, life’s work, life… The red flags… The red flags, the first raw shoots of socialist humanism that no amount of dust, filth, and blood could besmirch entirely… The charm of Western cities, so resistant to analysis, the sensation of a heedless world that knows nothing of hunger, terror, overwork, or the icy, ascetic exhilaration that alone lends meaning to the everyday round; the benign live-and-let-live attitude of that meanly commonsensical, pleasantly hedonistic world, sliding day by day toward apocalypse… The bitter joy of hand-to-hand combat with catastrophes ready to spring out of invisibility into tomorrow’s headlines, that gigantic intrigue snaring countries — pastel-colored on childhood maps — in its net of information and disinformation, ignoble acts and heroic achievements, statistics, petroleum, metals, messages… The conviction that we remain — however wretched — the most farsighted, the most humane beneath our armor of scientific inhumanity, and for that reason the most endangered, the most trusting in the future of the world — and unhinged by suspicion! Ah! With all of that falling away from me, what will be left for me, what will be left of me? This nearly old man, so wisely rational, being rattled along by an ailing taxi through a pointless landscape… Wouldn’t he be better off going home? “Shoot me, comrades, as you shot the rest!” At least such an end would follow the logic of History (since we have offered our lives to History… Carrying out our task to the end. If the sun must be extinguished, then we will extinguish it! “Necessity,” magic formula…). That would be easy; but what about complicity? What if there were no necessity? What if the great machine were running off the rails, what if its mental cogs were perverted, its social cogs corrupted? How did the Old Man put it — “Our hands have lost control, we have lost control of ourselves…” Here thought begins to founder, History being perhaps rather harder to penetrate than we’d imagined, with our three dozen trusty materialist axioms. They will probably kill me quickly. There are three good reasons for them to do so: 1. I am full of corrosive ideas (a Japanese cop would say “dangerous ideas”). 2. They are continuing the work. 3. I’m finished… But what work are they continuing, plunging headlong into what abyss?

His days, his nights turned over disjointedly in his mind. He thought of the faces of the persecuted — studied on photographs, for they were under constant surveillance, zealous spies were planted among them, their little apartments were entered unseen, the papers in their drawers rifled, their letters photographed — and they never suspected, they soldiered on at their microscopic activities, mimeographing newsletters, scraping together the contributions for a leaflet, expounding theories — sometimes correct ones — before an audience of thirty people (including three secret agents) upstairs at the Café Voltaire… Should I join them? Would they believe in me, when I don’t believe in them? I can believe in nothing now but power. Truth, stripped of its metaphysical poetry, exists only in the brain. Destroy a few brains, quickly done! Then, goodbye truth. Power is against them, against me, there’s nothing we can do about it. The torrent is washing us away.

D had been expecting to feel, if not the deep joy of deliverance, then at least the relief at the end of a migraine headache. Contrary to all prudence, he talked to himself aloud: “But I’m right, dammit!” The taxi driver half turned: “What was that, sir?”

“Nothing. Keep going. I’m ahead of schedule.”

Ahead of nothing. Only negation remains. No, no, no, and no. No to power. I, a nonentity, refuse my consent. I preserve my reason when you are losing yours. I assert that the destruction of the finest is the ultimate crime, the ultimate folly. If power turns against itself and starts savagely destroying itself, then I am right to be against it. But it will survive and I will perish, therefore it is right to be against me… Can it survive if it devours itself, if it suffers from so unprecedented an alienation? And surviving this, what if power betrays itself, changes its face and its aims? Then I am the faithful one by betraying it, but that is pure idealism, not practical sense.

He knew so many of the victims — tortured, executed — by their names, their faces, their weaknesses, their eccentricities, their talents, their journeys, their service records, their bookshelves, their greatness, that he had to stop himself remembering them for fear of being overcome by a demoralizing fatigue. Repressed, they massed within him to form the anonymous “cohort,” the dark “Number.” We fancied ourselves as the “iron cohort,” the elite of the elect, that was us! Our hubris has been properly punctured. The dark Number was arrived at by means of scrupulous cross-checks, and varied with the degree of bitterness, rebellion, or pity felt at the moment; in any case, it ran to five figures. So many victims.

What is “conscience”? A residue of beliefs inculcated in us from the time of primitive taboos until today’s mass press? Psychologists have come up with an appropriate term for these imprints deep within us: the superego, they say. I have nothing left to invoke but conscience, and I don’t even know what it is. I feel an ineffectual protest surging up from a deep and unknown part of me to challenge destructive expediency, power, the whole of material reality, and in the name of what? Inner enlightenment? I’m behaving almost like a believer. I cannot do otherwise: Luther’s words. Except that the German visionary who flung his inkwell at the devil went on to add, “God help me!” What will come to help me?

The big newspapers don’t have a conscience (he had bribed them often enough, through savvy intermediaries, to know that) and the little ones don’t count. The big writers wouldn’t believe me. Those who might, wouldn’t understand me, and it is not me that must be understood, it’s the nightmare of a sick power and the demise of a whole category of thinking men. Writers prefer other subjects anyway, less compromising, more commercial… I won’t say anything, not a word. If six months from now finds me quietly in Paraguay or California, I’ll order piles of psychology books and settle down to a study of conscience, the superego, the ego, and suspicion, the obsessiveness of suspicion, the sudden urge to liquidate the finest as though to become their equals by replacing them… My notions of all that are probably out-of-date. And there’s no such thing yet as social psychology. A day will come when people feel unable to live without such knowledge — more important than the knowledge required to build a machine. Catastrophes don’t need it. A psychology based on drilling men into obedience is quite sufficient for the Education Authority, the Psychiatric Service of the Public Health Secretariat, the Military Morale Office, the Politburo, or the Longevity Institute, devoted to the preservation of State cadres (whom the same State is destroying). Meanwhile these institutions, viewed as a whole, are working to prepare the catastrophes: the circle is closed.

D had the driver stop in front of a small café in Neuilly. Sitting at a white marble table, he ordered some ham and a glass of wine. His depression was lifting. A mysterious ballet where dark thoughts, beams of light, and profound instincts choreographed by an unknown director played out in his mind: physiology plus the spiritual X. The taxi driver, drinking at the bar, was discussing with the patron the finer points of cooking hare in white wine. D felt a rush of friendship toward these two men. Enough of this cerebral debauchery! The noose has been cut. Now to overcome the effects of my overwrought nerves. A little pride, old man, you’re one of the strong type. (It’s worth telling yourself this from time to time, if only as a means of autosuggestion…) He mentally reread the letter he had addressed the day before to the Special Envoy, twenty lines of calculated platitudes, yet containing this clear and honest passage:

A brief memo had followed regarding bank accounts, cases in progress, and liaisons with second-tier agents. It occurred to D that the concepts of disapproval, doubt, and blame (just one would have sufficed) canceled out the “absolute commitment” and the promise. They opened a thousand doors onto problems. They stood in judgment over the Party, the system, the Organization; any individual who judges the group, by the mere fact of such temerity, places himself outside the law. “After all, I was never afraid of being killed.” But now the seriousness of the risk amounted to near-certainty, even as its significance was humiliatingly trivialized. To embrace risk for the sake of the group required no justification. But a risk incurred for oneself? He told himself coarsely: “To live only for oneself is barren — like masturbation.”

“…nicely marinated in white wine,” the driver was repeating. “The onions browned separate. A clove of garlic, nutmeg…” Another voice, slurred and hearty, finished describing the recipe with an appreciative cluck of the tongue: “That, Monsieur, is what I call fine cooking!” “And hare stew?” D broke in happily. “Let me tell you,” said the patron, who was a dab hand with a shotgun. D listened to the instructions without taking them in. How good it would have been to exchange cordial handshakes with these fellows, to meet up for a Sunday’s shooting at Suresnes, to drink Beaujolais together! D’s gloom returned as he paid the bill. The difficult hour of his rendezvous with Nadine was approaching.

“No adulterers in sight today,” D said with a smile, when they were alone in the discreetly luxurious tearoom.

There was a lovely fold to her eyelids. Her cheeks were full and dimpled, her mouth richly outlined in scarlet. She had a sidelong way of looking you straight in the eye that was at once demure and forthright, the tough candor of a peasant girl from the steppes who has just stepped out of a smart hairdresser’s on the rue Saint-Honoré. Nadine offered her cheek, not her lips: displeased.

“Are you all right, Nadine? No one knows about your return to Paris, do they? Did you follow my instructions without fail — to the letter?”

“Oh, of course I did, what do you think?”

Her voice betrayed irritation.

“It’s extremely important, actually.”

“Well, not more than usual, is it? Sacha, I really hate it when you treat me like a child.”

He insisted: “It’s infinitely more important than you think. So, you didn’t phone anyone?”

The waitress took their order: tea with lemon and pastries. She was hard put to classify these two. Foreign? Lovers, married? She put her money on a heavy breakup scene, with a sprinkling of sentiment over the top like confectioner’s sugar on yesterday’s buns, plus a modest check to prevent hard feelings.

At very bad moments, D would feel muscles cramping while a chill crept over his skin, as though his energies were being sucked deep inside, the better to be healed, the better to pounce. His pupils shrank to pinpoints then. Nadine pulled off her gloves. Knowing him through and through — as she thought — she said, “Don’t make those eyes at me, Sacha. By now you don’t have any lessons to teach me about being careful. And what if I did call Sylvia — surely it doesn’t matter?”

“Ah.”

The stupid mistake. Like a tightrope walker who trips over a bit of orange peel in the street, when at thirty feet up with the drums rolling, he would never have made a false move. One fractured shin bone and that’s the end of the beautiful, brilliant acrobat. Shit!

“You did that?”

Nadine was sincerely bewildered.

“So now I’m to be suspicious of Sylvia, am I? Or perhaps Sylvia’s being watched? Sacha you’re out of your mind.”

He chewed on a slice of lemon. He had traveled, in the past, with a cyanide capsule glued to his scalp. He would have chewed that in the same way under the nose of the detectives. Twice: in China, in Germany…

“How did you get here? By car?”

“I changed taxis at Porte Maillot…”

“Good. Now please try to understand and try not to judge me. We’re going to America, it’s all fixed. I thought of everything except you calling Sylvia. I’ve broken with them, Nadine.”

Nadine thought in shattered images and disjointed phrases. As soon as an image became too upsetting it vanished, like it was torn up. The sentence trailed off, its gist telegraphed to minimize the disturbance. Everything that concerned her personally remained indelibly printed on a lower register. Departure — America, that’s nothing, we’ve traveled so much already! The word “broken” hit her like a nail bomb. Nadine glimpsed the broad flat nose of old Sémen — shot. She saw the fake but costly pearl necklace on Elsa’s white, nervous throat — Elsa, disappeared. The deep bluish hollows around Emmy’s eyes, eyes she’d always envied for their bewitching quality, very like hers, except that hers were not so bewitching — disappeared, Emmy who adored confectionery, Paris gowns, gloves, and handsome cads. Stout Kraus, saluting her as former officers do, click heels, bow low, kiss hand — gone, the fat malicious, twice-decorated ex-convict, et cetera, how, we’ll never know. The Poluyanovs, a young couple full of promise, thoroughly worldly to all appearances, fluent in four languages, thoroughly Anglicized, and shot, according to an unverifiable rumor. Bald Alexis, the one involved in that dreadful Ploesti business, the tortured hero who got out of prison six months ago — killed himself on being arrested they say, but it’s possible he was gunned down like a dog because he shot off his mouth (no noise allowed at night in apartment houses; and if there is noise, a pistol shot does less harm than an indignant voice). Nadine shook off these ghosts. Several others, on the point of appearing, hovered at the edge of memory. A ghastly exhalation steamed from a black pit toward her nostrils.

“How did you dare, Sacha?”

“On strictly rational grounds. If I’d waited, it would have come to the same thing before long. After Kraus, Alexis, Emmy, you know… And those were people with no influence…”

Her phone conversation with Sylvia appeared in a new and disquieting light. “That’s right, I’m back from Nice, meeting Sacha later on, off to Les Trois Quartiers tomorrow at eleven… pure rayon, Sylvette, in two colors, rose and burgundy, what d’you think? With a frightfully low neckline…” Sylvia’s husband, the addresses, the passports, the money to be drawn — all the necessary connections fell into place so ominously that she became visibly panic-stricken, and had the shabbiest thoughts in her life. “If they kill him, will they kill me too? I’m only small-fry. And we have so little money…”

“Careful,” D was saying. “Remain calm.”

Suddenly he broke into an oily, screen-actor’s leer, as though playing a roguish but likable bank manager.

“What charming gloves, my dear.”

This idiotic pose and change of tone because a couple, a navy officer and a rangy brunette with the profile of a greyhound, had just walked into the tearoom. A true-blue, genuine article of an officer: they don’t make ’em like that to order! D feared a hostile reaction from Nadine in view of the enormity of the accident. He had loved this woman for ten years. She was younger than he was, selfish, practical, a skillful operator during missions, superficially romantic when they were alone, gifted at times with a mercurial, inebriated, almost silent laugh and the undefended gaze of a primitive; simple in her loving, and as harmoniously built as a beautiful animal… For him she reserved her admiration, a flattered, willing sensuality, and a comradely directness of manner. There were no conventional prejudices between them.

An unexpected silence fell. Nadine called the waitress and ordered a liqueur.

“One for you, Sacha?”

“No thanks.”

He was held by an expression on her face that he had never seen.

“About Sylvia,” she said dreamily, “it’s a bore. So silly of me, I’m sorry. If I do what I have to do very quickly, it’ll be all right… probably. You can count on me. What you’ve done is irreparable. I think you’ve made a mistake, but I understand, it was strangling you. For me, the worst part isn’t that.”

What lay behind this detachment of hers, this calm as of total disaster? Her hard expression on the verge of tears?

“We’re an old couple, Sacha. You know that I love you in a special, profound way. I don’t always understand you, but sometimes I understand you completely. For me to take off, to leave now, is a bit… it’s a little awful.”

“Little and awful don’t go together,” he said, intent on her.

She brushed her fingers over the man’s hand where it lay on the tablecloth.

“I love someone else, quite differently from the way I love you. I was very happy. I wasn’t planning to keep it from you or to hurt you unduly. We’ll always be what we are — if you want. I can’t imagine myself without you, Sacha… But there’s this person I love. He doesn’t prevent me being yours. You’ve got to understand… And now, now…”

If a relationship is not free, it’s unhealthy. Sexuality can only be mastered through reason, by granting to it the part of us it demands. Thus delivered from its imperious claims, we can live for acts of intelligence and will. The human machine requires a good control mechanism which our physiologists — or moralists — named the brake. Repression diminishes a man as much as promiscuity. Jealousy is a leftover from an obsolete set of customs (among us), based on the subjugation of the female by the male and on private property. Moral hygiene, physical hygiene… The couple is a partnership of free beings, founded on comradeship in struggle… and so on and so forth, in formulas rehashed by Youth Club lecturers until the message had imprinted itself upon the smallest nerve filament. At least that’s what D thought up to a few seconds ago. We live on limited notions, dried out like plants pressed in a book. Under the shock, he pretended to stand by those shattered clichés. “Bad timing, in any case…” And four o’clock already. No time to lose.

“Who? Is he one of us?”

He only threw in the second question to provide a spurious justification for the first. What did it matter, when all was said and done? Bad timing for you too, Nadine, it’s just your hard luck. Now suffer. (He almost snickered.) We’re being tracked down together. The afterthought flashed through him that from now on she might — if push came to shove — betray him. Never expect too much of a woman: she has thousands of years of subjugation behind her.

“Who is he?”

“I can’t tell you. Forgive me. It’s impossible. I’ll take care of everything necessary, and we’ll leave whenever you say. But I…”

A stubborn violence rose in him. Who? “I need to know so as to take adequate precautions.”

“I can’t. But I promise, you have no complications to fear from that quarter.”

“The quarter of the flesh,” he reflected bitterly, with a vision of Nadine’s sculpted body, the raised mound of her sex, the thick curls that were lighter than her hair… “It’s beautiful,” he’d said to her once, “it charms me in the same way as your face.” Push those images aside. Nadine looked so woefully disconsolate that he was ashamed of feeling dominated by instinct — and of being, as instinct would have it, the stronger of the two.

“Very well, Nadine. Let’s assume I don’t care, even if I do — more than I would have expected. All I insist on are the precautions. No goodbyes. No letters or signals of any kind, to anyone.” (He imagined how many problems this could cause.) “You see, we are in the greatest danger. I’ve got you a new passport, with visa, and I’ve reserved a cabin. You have to follow my instructions to the letter. We sail on the seventh. Let’s go.”

All this pretended calm cost him effort. Oh to send the tea service flying, pick a fight with the naval officer, smash his face in, forbidden pleasures! He accompanied Nadine in a taxi to a point not far from her mid-price pension on the rue d’Amsterdam (it was bound to be staked out by now), which she would be leaving that same evening. “Say you’re going abroad, leave everything in order as though you were coming back, and later have a letter posted there from London, so nobody worries about your disappearance. Watch out for anyone taking photos, all right? I’ll expect you after nine. Keep in mind you could be tailed, and being tailed could be lethal…” Business over, as they sat side by side, without touching, in a muffled silence like a fog, D was wondering: “Who is he? One of us? A stranger she met on a train, at the beach, at the pension? Our life was wretchedly separate, between hasty meetings… I don’t want this obsession. I don’t care. Enough. Finished. But who?” Nadine took his hand.

“Have I hurt you terribly? I never thought…”

So convenient, never to think… !

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m fine. Worried — especially by your carelessness. It’ll work out… See you later.”

The cab was driving past the pension. D didn’t like the look of the news vendor leaning against the wall. “Is he always there?” “I… I don’t think so… If I remember right, he used to stand farther down, by the haberdashery…”

“Bye now, Sacha. Don’t be nervous.”

Nadine offered her cheek. He placed a cold kiss on it. She got out.

It was the day after a hike over the Roof of the World, in a Xinjiang village, if a point on the sterile steppe where a few mud huts cluster around a well can be termed a village. I was dying as I explored the Roof of Life, the environs of death, and they acquired for me the simple features of a continent’s bare peak. A diminutive yellow man with an Astrakhan bonnet and a triangular face, his pupils opaque within the fleshy slits of his lids, had fired a slim Japanese bullet at me from his rampart of ruins. I was in love with the ruins. After decoding the dispatches and encoding the reports; after the ceremonious interviews with turbaned elders in striped robes, venerable, devious, and unwashed, and greasy junior notables who were always smiling, homosexual, guarded, and false; after the tea, the salaam, the agreements that neither side would honor; after the hours spent mulling over the probable treacheries, the possible ambushes, and the itinerary of bands on the march along the goat tracks — then, when dusk cooled the air, I would leave the low longhouse of baked clay. First I went to visit N’ga, the keeper of the water. At the center of a blue-white space, jars of cold water stood coated with a sweat of droplets. No one was allowed to approach this water, which N’ga personally drew from the well. The people of this country were adept at poisons that had no taste and that could shrivel a man in a matter of weeks. Your mucus turns blue, your teeth rattle, you become sleepy, incurably sleepy, with a dull ache in your bones… N’ga was devoted to me. He clothed in white his ephebe’s body, molded by the lusts of local chiefs, he trilled piercingly on his flute, he played knucklebones all by himself, hooting with girlish laughter when he won. I had healed the sores that were torturing him, swabbed away his pus and his fleas, cleansed him of fear. He loved me with a servile passion, conveyed through his beautiful, blank eyes: it must come as a puzzle that the Powerful White Man from the Country of the Bear felt no hankering for his caresses. We had few words in common. I would ask, “Is the water cold and pure, faithful N’ga?”

His musical voice always made the same reply, gravely reciting, “Water refreshes the wise man, the rose, the beloved…”

This did not bode well for its capacity to refresh me, but I delighted in its taste of melted snow. Wryly, because solitude is a souring experience, I paraphrased the versicle to myself: “The same water refreshes the poisonous plant, the syphilitic woman, the traitor, and the torturer,” four classes of being I did my best to avoid.

On a crate within reach of N’ga’s tapered fingers lay a curved dagger and a revolver.

I followed a narrow alleyway of a uniform ocher color, reddened as the sun went down. Old low walls punctuated by rare, cramped openings onto other walls. The universe was made of petrified sand, drenched long ago in a deluge of blood. During the hot season, the air was rough and papery; when the wind picked up, the sand whipped the eyeballs, crunched between the teeth, adhered to the skin beneath one’s clothing. The alleyway petered out abruptly into a dry streambed. Strange, stunted cacti, robbing the aridity of some vital substance they defended with militant spines, burgeoned between purplish stones, the refuge of scorpions. Some undetectable calamity had recently exterminated the lizards — or they had scampered, sensing the approach of calamity. And this was the Year of the Lizard! Above the line of the horizon rose a marvelous transparency of sky. There were cold days when you could make out every detail of a distant rider’s dress with the naked eye, from several miles away… I was going toward the ruins. What ancestor, what descendant of Tamerlane had decided one day to raise a pile of severed heads in the long-gone oasis as a testimony to his greatness? Nomad civilization destroyed the farmers and their crops in order to re-establish the old grazing grounds… The ruins bristled forlornly in an expanse that had only just ceased to be scorching, and still gave off an insidious heat. A town, a fortress, a graveyard? It is often tombs which stand up best to time, for they have time, and speak to men through time, to tell them of the tomb. Some crumbling stands of blue- and rusty-colored masonry seemed older than the desert. The ruins spoke in a stifled, stifling language to me, like a waking dream. They came alive in my nocturnal dreams, encircled by poplars from Europe, as structures multiplied in eerie slow motion, portals swung open, and a rushing river glistened beyond. Valentine bounding lightly down the black marble staircase, a gaiety soft as shadow floating over her, before the trac-tac-tac of a machine gun mowed down her smile and I came awake. I believe this dream visited me more than once… It was, in psychological terms, a wish-fulfillment dream, and perhaps this impelled me to return to the ruins in search of a precise reminiscence which I could never find. The uncanniness of the space was deepened by a square doorway, half buried in the sand. I wanted to pass through it, but would have had to wriggle, and run a gauntlet of snakes and scorpions; my life was not mine to gamble with, I was being childish. What possible thing could lie beyond this door that I was stumbling my way around? I laughed at myself as one does in delirium or fright, or again, in the presence of some completely meaningless revelation. Were these ruins pre-Turkish, pre-Mongolian, perhaps more recent? What is time, what are ages? If I’d had a work of archaeology handy I would have reveled in tearing it up on the spot, page by page, and scattering the pieces to the wind of the ruins.

Returning from my accustomed stroll, the bullet of a Mongol or Turk grazed my breast. The gunman scurried off down the riverbed, swiveling nervously like a hunted fox. I felt neither pain nor anger. I could have shot back, I didn’t care to do so. I pressed down against the scratch with my handkerchief. N’ga dressed it with the pretty hands he then laid, joined together, under the wound to gauge the beating of my heart. “A strong heart!” I told him, for I was proud of it and N’ga’s damsel eyes pleased and repelled me in the same second by their meekness. I collapsed with exhaustion. It had been a sweltering day. I fell asleep with two cool hands over my heart.

I must have slept a long time, and did not wake once. In sleep I slid into fever, into visions, into the other delirious reality that had been lying in wait for me. It was magnificent. Heat weighed upon the ancient bricks and insinuated itself into the white room; together sun, desert, and sickness consumed me upon a calm white bonfire; and I felt, at times, bathed in freshness, pure joy, friendship, unselfish love — all the things I had never really known. If I passed my memories in review, scant happiness was there, no serenity, much harshness, steely exaltation, labor, hunger, filth, danger, and moments torn as if slashed by knives; a host of cherished dead whose faces memory averts (because they were often worth more than I was), the women of a night or of a season, the one I thought I loved who betrayed me while I was in prison, and the one who was faithful but died of typhus during a winter of famine, and I arrived too late to see her again, having crossed three hundred miles of snow; there was nothing left for me to keep of her, the neighbors had filched the sheets from the deathbed, the bed boards, the four books we owned, the toothbrush. I called together the taciturn bearded men, the women whose faces were stiff with guilt, the nail-biting children. “Citizens!” I said. “You have stolen nothing from us. You have taken what is yours. The belongings of the dead are for the living, and for the poorest first. And we are scarcely the living! We live for the men of the future…” I was a bad speaker in those days. Some of them came up and shook my hand, saying, “Thanks, Citizen, for your kind words, your human words. What do you want us to give back?” I cried: “NOTHING!” It was then that I understood the grandeur of the word nothing. All words are human, I reflected, even the ugliest of them, and nothing is left. I flew into a hopeless rage against inhuman death. “A biological fact!” I kept telling myself. “Valentine, where are you?” I yearned for church singing, the biology of the void! I was raving. I opened heavy dictionaries at the entry for Death. The Encyclopedia said: “Cessation of the functions of life, disintegration of the organism…” The printed paragraphs were dead themselves. Materialist that I am, I leafed forward, full of guilt, to look up Eternity. A definition as lifeless as the other… This was what I was carrying inside of me, in the neurological crannies where memories endure. And yet the days of fever had a prodigious clarity filled, thanks to a past free of death, with natural resurrection, with clarity, true thoughts, clear streams, comforting shade — all in disorder. Valentine was present whenever I wished for her, we were fused impossibly into a single joyous vibration that was calm, calm! The delirium soothed me for having lived. I don’t know how long it lasted; I existed beyond time. There were moments when I recognized the reality around me, but it was suspect, fragile, I felt for the case of secret documents under my pillow, I asked if the water was pure, and listening to the reply — “the wise man, the rose, the beloved” — I realized with no dismay that I was dying. I questioned N’ga: “Have the planes passed over yet?” “Seven,” signed his white fingers. Seven were sufficient for the operation under way. N’ga held a mirror over me and I saw, from my detachment, the chest wound that had blown huge and crimson, like a rose, a beloved, a wise man — a suppurating flower of hideously decomposed flesh, eating into me… No, eating into someone else, the rose, the beloved, death, biology, eternity, the encyclopedia! “What mysterious bliss,” I thought, and by simply closing my eyes I could summon up the delirium.

I opened my eyes. Or perhaps they were already open, and I merely forced myself to return to the other reality, now ending its useless existence, finite, pointless reality. The low ceiling, veined with green streaks… A basin full of bandages. A gangly spider on the wall… A stocky serving woman entered, braids coiled over her ears, silver hoops knocking against her cheeks. She moved about the room, I could perceive the attention in her gaze, focused on what? The spider watched her. I wanted to call N’ga, but I could not move or speak. Why was I fretting, about what, since I had nothing more to fear or to desire? The servant was nudging my suitcase, softly, softly toward the door, the suitcase that contained my most precious things, tea, sugar, matches, cigarettes, soap, a scholarly edition of the Manifesto… “Thief! Thief! Bitch!” I screamed and the stocky woman heard nothing, I knew that my brain alone was screaming and that its scream was nothing. So then, thought and will were participants in nothingness? The revolver under the pillow — my brain was seizing it, but a brain without hands is nothing, I was a part of nothing. Before pushing the suitcase through the doorway, the servant looked shrewdly straight at me. Her little eyes were as sharp and alert as a foraging rodent’s. My anger subsided. Take the suitcase, sneaky creature, weasel woman, if you want it to winter more snugly in your den, the spider won’t tell. I turned away, toward the places of my childhood: the tall reeds where my father hid his dinghy to wait for wild duck.

Anton emerged from the ruins, clad in gold-embroidered white silk, like a Persian prince in an illuminated manuscript. His horse’s hooves gamboled so lightly over the dead city, wasn’t it a wingèd charger? Anton on a wingèd charger! I laughed. Ha, you didn’t think it was possible? Neither did I, Anton. Then I saw him differently, with his flat face, funny diamond-shaped spectacles, hospital coat, and a syringe between his fingers. N’ga was holding a flaming-red object with both hands, a captive bird — hallo, they’ve dug my heart from my chest! No, it was a flask. Anton said, “Saved in the nick of time. You’ve really put me through it, you louse. Bloody hell! Time you came around. The melodrama’s over, or d’you want my fist in your face?”

“I don’t have a face… What’s the matter? Where did you come from?”

“You’re the one coming back from a long way off, brother. I got off a plane four days ago. Have some of this iced coffee. I bring you messages from on high. You’ve got a medal, you skunk.”

“I don’t care.”

“Yes, you do. You’re behind with your work.”

I was still suspended between two realities. “Behind with my work” brought me to earth with a bump. Clever, Anton. “Tell me about Mania,” I said feebly.

“Mania has remarried for the third time since she left you. Getting uglier by the minute. A veritable camel, my brother. More coffee?”

At university, I had adored Anton. We never stopped bickering. He was inventing biological Marxism or Marxist biology or was it dialectical biology… He had no time for old-world romantics who believe in love. “The couple,” he would say, in the insufferable tone he adopted to emit verdicts beyond appeal, “is necessarily nothing but a two-bit drama determined by physio-psychological, not to say social, misunderstandings… Most women are garrulous vaginas with the brains of a sparrow… The outcome of a hundred thousand years of domestic exploitation.” A textbook case of the believer with a cynical veneer. I wonder what happened to him? Back then he was a favorite of men in high places; he must have followed them to the grave, as he foresaw. “We have built” — it was one of his sarcastic sayings — “a colossal infernal machine of stupendous perfection, and we’ve settled down for a nice snooze on top of it, wearing shiny red-paper laurel crowns on our heads. There!” Nothing left of him but this memory of mine… (There’ll be time to spare for sorting out memories. Anton lecturing about how we should only preserve useful ones: “To forge a living memory, in the service of an active present…” What use is your memory now, dear Anton?)

This unease that recalls you to me, Anton, comes from Nadine. Nadine is straight as a die, mettlesome, instinctual. She’s right, I’m wrong: instincts are always right in the end. We all construct elaborate traps for ourselves, and when we walk straight into them, we’re stunned…

Nadine lit a big fire in the fireplace and the room filled with well-being. She threw in some letters, photos, several passports. Her devastation had attained a calm of utter catastrophe. It was compounded of two disasters, one trivial, the other almost inconceivable, and it was the trivial one that caused the most pain, like an open wound. “Sacha only made up his mind at the end of the twelfth hour, because we were in Hell…” For two years now Nadine had been afraid to open a newspaper, receive a letter, speak a name, think of a person, let slip the least doubt concerning the totally absurd accusations that were universally proclaimed, to seem not to be applauding the unforgivable with all her heart and soul. Conspiracies whirled around like a witches’ sabbath… At first she’d believed in them, like everyone; then she’d willed herself to believe the unbelievable; then she’d feigned belief and, lately, she’d been smothering fits of sobbing under her pillow. Sacha, who feared being alone with her — Sacha whom she pictured all alone with his opaque tragedy — packed her off to Mont Saint-Michel, to Nice, Cannes, Antibes, Juan-les-Pins on the least pretext: “Go look after your nerves, darling, I feel better facing all these worries alone…” Nadine at the seaside tried her best to read Proust, such penetrating novels, but what was the goal in life of all those people? She strolled along the beaches in the company of American ladies, an English boxer, flirtatious gentlemen dressed like fashion plates — and these people too had no goal in life, they served no purpose whatsoever, and the sight of them would have been demoralizing had it not been so ridiculous. She was invited to a pigeon shoot. Rigging yourself out in white flannels to perform serial execution on birds — how perverted! It made her sick. Only in small fishing ports, reading Zola, did she feel good.

Sacha withdrew from her so as not to see in her eyes the anguish that tormented him too. “What’s going on? Weren’t all of these disgraced men trustworthy, intelligent, incorruptible? Where is this leading us? I can’t understand it anymore. I’ll soon stop believing in anything…” He’d only said that much, but with a look on his face that she would never forget. It was during their dismal night in Juan-les-Pins. Sacha had kept her away from Paris. “Keep as far from the job as you can, we’re going through a very bad moment,” which clearly meant “I don’t want you to die,” not that it would prevent anything… From time to time he telegraphed to arrange a meeting: two or three days of fresh air, two or three nights of lovemaking. The news must have been dire, because he was unable to unwind in Juan-les-Pins and when she came to bed beside him, naked, he noticed neither her new perfume nor her white enamel earrings — not even that her breasts were the firmer after a regime of massages and cold showers. Instead of making love, they conducted a frosty, fitful conversation — all in veiled allusions. “No, I’m not in a bad mood, darling…” “Then look at me, Sacha, and stop glowering. Do you love me?” Nadine felt ashamed of the breasts he didn’t see. “Yesterday I learned of three disappearances…” He gave three names. “Executed?” “Obviously, ah, you want me to dot the i’s…” “But why, why? Is it going to continue?” Nadine yanked the sheet over her shoulders, ashamed of her why’s which no longer made sense. He stubbed his cigarette out on the pillow where it made a small black hole, like a bullet’s, and stared at the mark with a strange laugh. “Why? You silly girl. Because they were old, well-known, and battle-hardened. Because they were in the way, because they knew as much as I do…” He swigged some whiskey straight from the bottle. Their bodies moved closer without heat, Nadine suppressed a shiver; they did not desire each other. Sacha was ruminating stolidly, eyes on the ceiling. Nadine thought (she was sure she only thought), “What about you? What about us?” and he answered her, “We’ll go the way of the others. The avalanche rolls onward, and we’re in its path. We count for nothing.” Nadine let the shivers overcome her. “Then let’s run, Sacha, escape anywhere!” There was an interminable lull before he shot back: “Stop talking drivel! It’s treason to run away. Me, a traitor? To save my own miserable skin, or your pretty skin, eh? And then what would we be left with? This old world we execrate? Pass the whiskey.” They took pills to be able to sleep… And now she was feeding the postcards from Juan-les-Pins into the fire.

The other disaster, trifling by comparison, sliced into an open wound. No meeting with him tomorrow, no meeting ever again with those boyish clever eyes, that somewhat hard mouth, that wiry athlete’s body, those clumsy nimble hands, that lively voice, its flatness rendered abruptly tender under the impulse of a sharp organic impulses… There were so few problems for him, everything was what it seemed, so few backstage machinations in his world constructed out of a succession of planes each of which negates and destroys the previous one! It says in books that it is simple to surrender to a man who attracts you — who needs love? — that the moment’s pleasure can be savored like a glass of champagne. And I don’t really love him, that overgrown boy who thinks he’s a man, I don’t love him, I couldn’t live with him for a week without finding his naïveté stupid… And so what? It would be a simple kind of love, like a ramble on a heath. But we’re not cut out for healthy outdoor rambles, are we, we’re better at creeping through tunnels! Tear him out, leaving a throbbing wound behind: the amputated arm still feels pain. Nadine’s eyes swam with tears. All she had of him was two notes in his sprawling script, signed with a trenchant Y: Yours. She put them to her lips before casting them into the fire. She was packing a small suitcase with what she would take when a knock came at the locked door. Immediately the intrusive rat-tat-tat brought her back to earth. Like a cat she reached the door in two swift bounds, pressing herself against it.

“Yes… What is it?”

“If you please, Madame… You’re wanted on the phone.”

The hoops of danger tighten without warning and you can’t breathe.

“Tell them I’m not here… I’ve gone out, I’ll be back late.”

“Yes Madame, very good Madame.”

But it was bad, very bad… Apprehension made short work of sadness. Nadine slipped on new clothes she had hardly worn, so that she’d be harder to recognize in the street. A green velvet toque pinned to her curls, she applied lipstick almost without checking in the mirror, straining to hear. The room was becoming more oppressive than a prison cell. At the far end of the corridor, the telephone whirred again. Nadine heard the chambermaid say, “Madame’s not back yet, Monsieur, no, not before midnight…” The word “Monsieur” stood out in black, buzzing letters. Who was it? Who could be calling? If Sacha, then he must have a serious reason. The other man didn’t know this number… A message from Sylvia? Has the hunt begun? The animal urge to flee coursed through her limbs like a torrent. She caught sight of herself in the mirror, her broad face narrowed into hard lines, a face warped by the magnet of escape. She rang for the maid.

“The gentleman has phoned four times, but I just told him the same thing, Madame, like you told me to.”

A good-looking girl from the Midi, the maid, with a hypocritically modest gaze. Wasn’t she peering a trifle too intently from under those long straight lashes? Servants are there to be bribed, it’s the ABC of the art! Nadine smiled crookedly. Say something natural, aggressive, to break the silence of the telephone and divert the girl’s attention… Nadine thought she was talking vulgarly, but really her voice sounded deranged.

“Have you had lovers, Céline? No? Well, you will. You’ll find out all about it. He’s my lover and I’m leaving him, do you understand? I have my reasons.”

“Yes, Madame.”

“I’m going away on a trip.”

“Ooh yes, Madame, it must be painful, Madame.”

Nadine opened her bag and pressed a banknote into the maid’s hand.

“And not a word. It’s nobody’s business but my own.”

“I’m sure it isn’t, Madame.”

Air, air, I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. The elevator. You never know how far down you’re going. Alone in the dark trench of the hall it all vanished: the room, the smoldering papers, the telephone, Céline, their hallucinatory exchange. Nadine stepped to one side and paused to appraise the street. Opposite the doorway, a flower vendor — chrysanthemums — was lowering her basket to the ground. A bus went by, then a couple, a very young couple talking fast and, it seemed, heatedly. The sidewalks were wet, glistening with swiftly alternating reflections of yellow and red from a neon sign. The street was calling: dive in and lose yourself.

Nadine walked quickly, with determination, wary of hailing a taxi straightaway. She needed to check the lay of the land. She stopped before the window of a shoe store: in the glass she could see behind her without turning around. Nobody, apparently, but Paris streets are so crowded at nine in the evening… Vaguely reassured all the same, Nadine turned the corner. Someone turned and faced her so quickly that she nearly bumped into the fellow. “Excuse me… Oh! You? Alain!”

As he took her arm his fingers squeezed her wrist, hard. His hand was hot.

“Well, what a piece of luck!” the voice sounded false to her. “What a coincidence! Are you in a hurry?”

He wanted to sound tender, but something held him back. Too frank — he couldn’t manage one of those intimate phrases that sounded so clear from his lips. Nadine was thinking: think quickly, act innocent, it’s logically impossible that he already knows. He’s not in touch with Sylvia, but he is with Mougin, with B, with R. Neither B nor R will find out for a while, and they may even be kept in the dark altogether, so as not to terrify the one or demoralize the other. The telephone was still ringing in her ears. She’d just said, “It’s my lover,” in an echo of her secret obsession. Now she said, “You called me?”

And as he was answering, “No, I don’t have your number,” she knew he was lying. So he knows. So, concealed not far from my door, he’s been watching. Probably with someone else who filled in while he dialed from the bar. The strong hand clamped to her wrist was upsetting Nadine who wished she hadn’t blundered into the first side street, with scarcely a light along it, even fewer passersby, and at the end a dark square lined along one side by the decrepit railings of a private mansion that looked abandoned. The hiss of tires made her turn. A black car came up behind them, sliding closer.

“Let’s cross,” Nadine said. “And let go of me. It makes me nervous. You know we mustn’t meet in the street, it’s against the rules.”

She felt better when he let go of her wrist. Two women and a man were walking toward them. Alain made no objection to crossing the street: since it was a two-way street, the black car could not hug the curb along the other sidewalk. The fear in Nadine’s body and soul redoubled: the dark presence of the car triggered her reflexes, the muscles think faster than the brain. Long ago, at the age of thirteen, Nadine had fought among partisans defending the ford across a river, fully aware that if the horse-men on the other bank were to pass over, death and torture would pass over with them. The great scythe, flagellation. Nadine knew in those far-off days that if captured she would be raped, flogged, possibly strung up. She had seen women and children her own age dangling from the trees in their undershirts with glistening, dirty flesh, offering swollen tongues and weirdly purpled breasts to the flies. Prone near the water’s edge, shielded by a screen of rushes, her belly pressed against the damp grass, the child Nadine took careful aim at a tall silhouette emerging from the facing bank — a centaur — and when it fell apart like a broken toy, the man tumbling off while the startled horse reared up in the shallows, the child Nadine joyfully cursed the defeated enemy. “You won’t be the one to pass over me, you horned devil!” Such schools build strength for the future. She had a jewel of a Browning in her handbag. She casually undid the clasp with the tips of her fingers. (If he notices, too bad!) The appetizing display of a dairy shop shone brightly on the sidewalk. Nadine halted at the edge of that light. The black car overtook them. Past the dairy, a dim bistro belched out loud voices. A ragged chorus in the back room joined in the song’s refrain — idiotic but loaded with jollity thick as a heavy wine:

“Somebody’s having a good time,” Alain murmured, with a sad little snicker.

Nadine felt utterly remote from him, as though he’d never held her in his arms. The enemy. She was forced to playact, to cloak the hardness in her voice.

“Listen my young friend, you’re not behaving seriously! It’s not safe. You know we’ll see each other tomorrow!”

“And you know we won’t, not tomorrow, not ever. Your husband is a traitor.”

The rest of their brief exchange was as hackneyed as the lines of a bad play. “Are you crazy? What are you talking about!” “He confessed it to me himself, this morning.” “You’re crazy. It’s impossible, I don’t believe you.” “Ah, so you don’t believe me, you don’t believe me… Have you seen him?” “No.” This lie revived Nadine’s sincerity. “No? Then you don’t know yet! Listen, Nadine, listen darling, my head is spinning, I can hardly believe it myself, it’s as if the earth and the sky were both quaking at once. Him of all people! If only this were a comedy of errors! I went straight to Mougin, and he knew already. Your husband is a traitor. You can’t possibly go with him.” The refrain about the little lady in white, in white, in white submerged the young man’s unhappy voice. “I shouldn’t suffer on his account,” thought Nadine. “He really is a big kid who knows nothing, understands nothing, doesn’t have an inkling…” To place her hands on Alain’s temples, to plant kisses on Alain’s eyelids, to say, “My poor love, it’s too terrible, calm down, don’t judge so fast. Sacha will never become a traitor, he’s suffering worse than you, worse than the dead, his conscience is screaming… And that’s his only crime.” She looks at him with moist eyes.

“Beautiful Alain…”

But she also registers that the black car has come to a halt fifteen steps away. That no one is getting out, that fortunately there are people around and farther off even a policeman, his short cape hanging in stony folds. She pulls herself briskly together, as though to transmit a message learned by heart, and Alain is familiar with that gesture of hers since they used to work together.

“I don’t believe you, Alain. You’re telling me an incomprehensible story. I’m going to find out about these… these idiotic rumors. Someone may be plotting against Sacha… We’ll meet tomorrow. Now go away and simmer down.”

Alain, too, looks at the black car for a long moment (though in truth, none of this occurs in a measurable time); he turns his head, sees the police officer, maybe estimating the numbers of passersby, some of whom may be waiting for an agreed-upon signal. The bistro door swings open to disgorge a clutch of raucous couples, still flush with partying. A man’s hand cups a heavy female breast swathed in silk the color of wine lees. “In white, in white, in white, a li’l laaa-dy!” Nadine seizes the moment, and almost shouts: “Go away!”

Turning on her heel, she marches off as fast as she can without breaking into a run. Rapid footsteps multiply behind her, she hears the click of stilettos on the paving stones, gropes in her bag for the tiny Browning, not much, better than nothing, at least make a noise… It’s only one of the party couples. They stagger against the wall, the man’s mouth glued to the woman’s neck. Flat pasty faces surge forward under a streetlight, bearing down on Nadine. No question about this bunch! The Browning keeps them at bay. Nadine hovers for a fraction of a second, opposite the policeman. Here they won’t dare. The flat faces waver. A laugh of deliverance rises in her throat, just like long ago when the singing bullet toppled the rider at the ford into the green waters of the Ural river. A stone falls into this stifled laughter as into a black puddle. What if the policeman were a fake? Easy enough to arrange. He has the florid, affable face of a wine lover, but what does that prove?

This street is a bit brighter, livelier. A bus is pulling away. Nadine leaps onto the back step, hampered by her carrying case and her bag, and loses her balance as she fumbles to unhook the chain. Someone grabs her elbow, heaves her up, makes room for her. “Easy, Mademoiselle, you could spoil your looks that way… It would be a pity, you know!” The gentleman’s chivalrous smile fades as he sees that it’s not a little black purse she’s holding in her hand but a little jewel of a revolver and notices wildness in her hard blue eyes. Confidentially he whispers, “I’d put that toy back in my purse if I were you.” Nadine, her bag snapped shut, bursts out laughing. “My word! You love him that much, Mademoiselle, and he’s a bad lot?” She sees a plump clean-shaven chin, a pair of soft, brown, cynical eyes, a gold-striped tie. “No,” she rejoins in a truly detached voice, “still women can be such fools! It’s over.” The bus irrupts into the vivid lights of the Place du Havre.

At the hotel in the rue de Rochechouart, Nadine introduced herself to the porter with aplomb. “Madame Noémi Battisti.” The porter was busy with clients, but he inspected her obliquely, with a disagreeably lackluster stare. “Room 17, fourth floor to the left, take the elevator, Madame.” Nadine affected the same indifference, but her cagey, alert glance had a furtive charm. “Of all the lying little hussies with knobs on,” the porter crooned to himself, “this takes the cake or my name’s not Gobfin. Monsieur Battisti sports a fine pair of horns!”

Sacha kept the door locked. He opened it for her.

“Why do we have to stay in this flophouse, Sacha? The porter looks like a tubercular stool pigeon, which he certainly is, or a part-time pimp — which he probably is.”

Sacha laughed and took Nadine into his arms, without energy.

“The world is full of small-time scoundrels, why not enjoy them? It’s reasonably clean and it’s cheap. And the area is crowded with people every night. If they’re after me, they’ll probably start looking on the Left Bank or around the Étoile.”

The symmetry of Nadine’s features blurred, as though he was seeing her through running water. “I don’t care what you say, that fellow gives me the creeps… And the women, tittering behind every door. A sordid house full of sordid affairs…”

“Women’s affairs,” he shrugged.

Nadine turned away from him and lobbed her bag onto one of the twin beds, so awkwardly that it fell open and the Browning slid onto the yellow counterpane. As he moved to put it back, Sacha was struck by the fingerprints smudging the blue steel. “So you were playing with that, were you? Anything happen?”

“I was scared. Well, not really scared, but now I am. And the face of that pimp undertaker downstairs, and those threadbare carpets in the corridor…”

“Pimp I grant you,” said Sacha, straight-faced, “but undertaker, now, let’s not exaggerate…”

Nadine rubbed her hands over her face forcefully to wipe away the sensation of the black street, the black car, the dangerous enemy faces floating up at her. Her eyes reemerged, wider, ominously blue.

“They were singing: One little lady in pink, in pink, no, in white, in white… I thought it was all over… For me, anyway…”

She finished more quietly: “…and that I’d never see you again… Phew, I feel better…”

The matching lamps on the bedside tables glowed a seedy intimacy surrounded by hostile shadows. Sacha turned on the ceiling fixture: three anemic bulbs nestled in pink glass tulip shades. The room filled not so much with light as with a pinkish-yellow haze. Nadine sat on one of the beds, her head turned away. He saw an artery flutter along her neck and her hair tremble. He could see her from the back too in the mirror, the droop of the shoulders, one arm twisted back, one hand laid flat on the bedspread… He read fear in that neck, those shoulders, that arm, that hand, something worse than fear for all he knew. Overcoming his unfocused anger, he tried to sound as positive as possible. “Come on now, Nadine, we have nothing to be afraid of right now… Did you run into anyone?” (Suspicion, within him.) “Come, you and I, we’re old friends, you can tell me anything…”

“I want us to change hotels, I insist we change. Is it too late tonight?”

“Were you followed?”

“No.”

“I promise we’ll do whatever you want — but tomorrow. Why can’t you trust me? When have you ever known me to be reckless?”

What must be feared above all, in the struggle, is panic. Our nerves preserve the imprints of animal fears, of human fears, accumulated over millions of years. A moment comes when they disobey our will. We no longer know what we are.

“Have you had supper, Nadine? I’ll order something from room service.”

“No. Who could care about supper?”

D went to check the door; an old household lock, a small inside bolt, the flimsy wood would give way at the first shove… “And you expect us to sleep here?” asked Nadine as if she couldn’t believe it. “Could you sleep here?” “Why not?” He drew her to the window and opened it. The empty street below was punctuated by the halos of streetlights; higher up, a vast glow suffused the misty sky, iridescent with flickering light. Nadine leaned out into space with a pleasurable feeling. D upbraided himself: you don’t open a window at night without turning the lights off first. Now he did. Fifty feet down, shadowy doorways provided excellent observation posts. The beige carapace of a car crawled by, a puddle of grayish light marked the entrance to the hotel. D put his arm around Nadine’s waist. “I had a fright,” she said. “I was silly. Look down there. We could fall, and it would all be over in few seconds…”

“Where do you get these notions, Nadine? It isn’t like you. We battle on, we persevere, you know we’re right. Besides, it wouldn’t be over in anything like a few seconds. Just imagine the ambulance, the hospital, the blood transfusions, the injections, the inquest, the hairline crack in your spine that leaves you paralyzed for life… That was a really idiotic thing to say.”

“I know. It’s hard to end it. Give me a cigarette… You’re always so sensible.”

She was calmer now, as though returning to reality.

“I met Alain. Mougin knows. They’re looking.”

She related the encounter in detail. (Alain, Alain, he felt wounded by the name. Who? Alain? Impossible, surely, but why impossible? We are free agents. He sniggered: Now pay the price…)

“We’ve lost a few days’ head start, that’s all…” concluded D, his voice steady. “I’ve sown some clues to make them think we’re going to London.”

“They won’t believe anything you want to make them believe!”

Fair enough.

“Close the window, I’m cold,” said Nadine.

Worries thickened inside him: dark waters overflowing their banks. With the two little bedside lamps back on, the room felt more congenial. And there was something appealing about the maid who brought in their tray of consommé, cold chicken, and weak tea. “You’re Italian, aren’t you?” Nadine asked with friendly interest. “Yes, Madame. You can see it, no?” “We’re from Piedmont,” said Madame Noémi Battisti, seriously. “Don’t overdo the Piedmonts, what with our garbled Italian,” D teased later. “Remember Sorrento?”

“I do,” said Nadine, and she looked at him with her beautiful eyes full of wonderment.

“We’re starting a different life, Nadine.”

(More accurately he might have said: We are ending one whole life.)

“Are you happy with the name I found you — Noémi? A primitive woman’s name. I can see you bathing, as in Sorrento… It will happen.”

(At least admit the possibility. All that remains is to make it happen.)

That they would never again lay eyes on other, more humble places, clothed by winter snows more stirring than the gilded blues of Sorrento. Separately and together they both had this thought — and pushed it away.

“You have a lot of strength left, Sacha…” Nadine said sadly.

(Too much to no longer be of any use…)

“I’ve always believed that a man is identical to his will.”

She concurred, with her most limpid gaze, wondering whether he could be altogether sincere. Was he saying it to comfort her or to comfort himself? A man’s will counts so little these days — and his counted not at all now, not even enough to contrive a shaky salvation for them… While he, calm thanks to a courage that might only be a form of discouragement, told himself that will is sometimes no more than a breastplate clapped over a puny torso, stiffening the despair beneath. In order to exist fully, the will demands a goal.

“I almost like this room now,” Nadine said. “It’s so quiet outside. And those glimmers there across the boulevard are like flowers reflected in water…”

He refrained from pointing out the inaccuracy of the image. The nocturnal glimmers of Paris are those of a raging commercial furnace: not flowers or lakes, but electric discharges insinuating themselves into the nervous system in order to get people to buy and sell debauched pleasures! The hotel was drowsing off. The whine of the elevator grew fainter, a door closed, the plumbing boomed and gurgled, noises that were a part of silence, a reminder of the many disparate lives winding down their daily cycle. The one certain communion among men is found in exhaustion, in sleep. In the pathos of sleep all faces look alike, resembling the faces of the dead. Under every forehead, dreams play out nearly identical primordial desires in shifting arabesques, but there is no reconciliation there.

“We’re free tomorrow, Nadine, we can sleep for ages.”

To sleep for ages, a wish that reverberated within him. They got into their parallel beds, then Nadine, her milky arms raised and crossed behind her head, said, “Come here to me, Sacha,” because she was touched by a chill of loneliness. Their bodies met without the exaltation of love, letting go to a simple carnal tenderness. Closely entwined, they felt the same warm wave bring them the relief of simple existence. “Don’t think, above all, don’t think,” D repeated to himself. He succeeded, a healthy discipline. Nadine, whose rosy half-moon lids had closed, suddenly froze, her pupils wide and staring. “Listen… that noise behind the door…” Instantly master of himself, D watched the door in a mirror. The revolver within reach. A subterranean crackle came from the hotel doorbell, and stopped; a lethargic footfall grew fainter on the stair… “It’s nothing, darling,” he said, “don’t be afraid.” He caught a glimpse in the other mirror of her frantic face. The deep inner wave rocked him anew, a radiant smile erased the expression of apprehension verging on horror in Nadine’s features.

The world sank back into an order bereft of excitement, communion, and joy in which one is content merely to have lived, and to be suffering from neither a toothache nor an immediate terror. “Protect your peace of mind, Nadine… I don’t like these frightened attacks of nerves. We’ve run so many risks before!” Many, yes, but minor ones compared to what was in store, poisonous spiderwebs stretched across the final break with all the reasons for living — ideas, cause, motherland, unity in danger, invisible battle for the future, vision of a forward-marching world! Everything was falling apart, only risk itself remained, impoverished, coarsened by the loss of any real justification. “It’s awful, though,” Nadine said, “I must get used to the idea that…” D followed the curve of her fingers, the sheen of her oval nails, as she wiped the beads of sweat above her eyebrows. Who? This absurd jealousy was humiliating. See how weak the liberated man free of old moral conventions is in you! Nadine sensed that lying motionless beside her, he was slipping away from her. “Don’t leave me,” she said plaintively.

Mechanically, thinking exactly the opposite, he heard himself say, “Your encounter with Alain doesn’t make anything worse.”

“Sacha don’t mention that name to me ever again if you can help it. I hate him.”

He understood, obscurely but totally. “It’s really not worth hating him, Nadine…”

Before settling down to sleep, D went out to case the corridor. Two pairs of shoes left for cleaning outside the door next to theirs caught his attention. The male pair was repellently smart: gray snakeskin with crepe soles. The woman’s shoes, pushed out of shape by bulging feet, suggested an overweight person always trotting about town. “Miserable creatures,” thought D as he listened to the mingled snores of the sleeping couple. Back in their room, he glanced down at the street over which the row of lamps stood watch. Nothing alarming there. Nadine, her profile buried in a pillow under a tangle of hair, was asleep, a big, lovely, pacified child. “There is no sin in you, Nadine… Instinct knows nothing of sin…” He was hurting nonetheless, and reproached himself for thinking in terms of sin. Oh, what did words matter! The two loaded Brownings, each covered by a handkerchief, were luxury playthings, perfectly appropriate for their intended purpose, crafted in noble metal for the grand game of murder and suicide. We’ve come a long way since the flint dagger, such a cumbersome instrument for killing oneself! Did the primitive Ancestor have any inkling of voluntary death? Or is that an attainment of the higher civilizations, which offer no other means of escape? Let’s hope some analyst will one day elucidate this psychological question. As for myself, Mr. Analyst, I can’t help believing in an innate drive toward destruction and death. We will only have a true sense of the splendor of living in some distant, still-unimaginable future; perhaps we will have it… And that perhaps is our greatest justification, it even implies, for now, a sufficient justification of suicide… D switched off the lamps. Through the curtains a dim lacework of light patterned the room.

In the depths of slumber, Nadine felt an obscure — colossal — vise tighten impalpably around her. Formless tentacles turned into cold serpents twining around her body, a thick hawser weighed upon her neck. The black car opened to reveal its cramped cells. In each an upright cadaver was propped. Nadine was a little girl walking barefoot through thawing snow, reanimated by the vivifying burn of the icy water. A volley of bells rang out, Christ is risen, risen! There was an onion dome of fiery red peppered with golden stars, swaying horribly over shabby wooden houses, it’s going to fall, it’s falling! The Black Maria with its cells is leaving; it didn’t come for me but for other people, so much the better — not for me! I’m ugly and I have abominable thoughts. Crows flapped from one tree to another, for you, we come for you, they shouted, to pluck out your eyes! “But why must I be hanged?” Nadine demanded of the stern, hairless face that had popped up close to hers. Its lips moved slightly. “Hanged, no.” The serpent knots unraveled, vanished, the rope snapped, the gun went off in a violent spurt of night-blue flame within a rainbow cloud of smoke. The horror was in not being able to move — Oh god, it can’t be, it’s a bad dream, I’m going to wake up… Nadine woke up. A motorcycle was backfiring in the street. Her watch said 5:45, the hour of executions, more or less, when executions have an hour. It was still dark. She could only reconstruct the nightmare in incoherent snatches. Her hand shook as it reached for the tumbler of water. She nudged at a fold of batiste with her finger, and found herself intent upon the small Browning. Two squeezes of the trigger, and both of us would be delivered… Her hand shook worse because she was more frightened of this temptation than of all the darkness in the world. Through the fabric, so as not to feel its magnetic touch, she picked up the gun and leaned out of the bed to propel it onto the floor, under the other bed, Sacha’s. This move did her good, but now she could see herself in the mirror, a whitish specter looming indistinctly in the ever cold and twilit region where the dead await their turn to be reborn — or not, since resurrection is just another dead superstition… “Resurrection is dead, it’s a scientific fact.” Without thinking, she switched on the bedside light. Sacha was asleep on his back, broad forehead, thin mouth, protuberant blue-tinged lids, scarily unlike himself. Detached from the universe. Dead. Nadine weighed that certainty. The icy chill from beyond the grave became an all-encompassing peace. I am dead as well. It’s good. It’s simple.

And Sacha opened his eyes as he did every day of his life, those preoccupied eyes, wise, real, and infuriating.

“What’s the matter, Nadine?”

“Oh, nothing, I thought I heard…”

“It’s a motorcycle. What a lout, making a racket at this hour! Lie down. Go back to sleep.”

He exasperated her. The exasperation melted into tenderness.

“I love you,” she said in a childish voice. “I love life, I love death, it’s strange…”

His voice echoed hers: “Strange.”

Monsieur Gobfin, assumed by unobservant clients to be the hotel desk clerk, actually performed much more important tasks. The trust of a proprietor ill with a kidney problem invested him with quasi-managerial status; and if he spent the busiest hours of both day and night behind the little reception counter, distributing the mail, hooking and unhooking the room keys, it was mostly due to his love of the job. An eye on everything! Seven minutes’ walk from place d’Anvers, six minutes from the confluence of the rue de Clignancourt and the boulevard de Rochechouart, this hotel was like Lutetia itself, a kind of vessel anchored in the middle of treacherously troubled waters. Fail to count the linen returned by the laundry two days in a row, and you will soon count the cost of your oversight. Neglect to appear in the kitchen two hours before the first sitting for luncheon — and talk about pilferage, my rascals! A reasonable level of theft, let’s say around ten percent is par for the course because in this world, or at least here in Paris, everybody’s got to eat; but the house has to make a profit too, eh? And Monsieur Gobfin would never stand for “being taken for a fool, what with the price of Normandy butter.” “I’m nobody’s sucker,” he’d say, and people took his word for it.

Monsieur Gobfin’s long sparse hair, glued in black strips with brilliantine over his yellowed scalp, along with his hollow cheeks, conveyed such a knowing, indulgent sagacity that his eyes hardly ever strayed below the relatively higher zones. The brown, skittish gaze that never rested, shying away as soon as it encountered another’s, shot out simultaneously in several directions, scrutinizing the clients from bottom, sides, and angles, homing in on the glints of soul that show through in the back of a man’s hand, the cut of a coat, the timbre of a cough, the manner in which a pen is gripped or a bill examined. A glint of soul, needless to say, is an excessively literary flourish in this context, foreign to Monsieur Gobfin’s vocabulary. He would rather have said, “how shall I put it, something like an odor, at times even a bit of a stench.” His perusal was apt to begin at the level of the gut, for the belly is infinitely expressive: a pederast’s paunch can never be confused with that of a public works engineer who goes for the tarts in the Lune-Qui-Rit bar. The rotundity of the con man is quite unlike, say what they will, that of the stockbroker, who is equally devious but for whom the letter of the law is sacred. The fabric of which garments are made, their quality, their color, their buttons, their wear, tear and care — all are of a revealing eloquence. It is impossible for a sea captain, when in civilian dress, to wear the same three-piece suit in the same way as a fashionable type who specializes in trafficking female slaves — white, black, or other. Their hands, exposed below sleeves or cuffs, the hair on male hands, the bumps and furrows of the joints, the rings on the fingers, say more about someone than identity documents, which are, at least one in ten, expressly designed to say nothing… Monsieur Gobfin was unaware of being a profound psychologist, but practically speaking that’s what he was, to the unappreciated extent that it is possible to be one without leaving that vast circle bound by sordidness, cunning, stupidity, and police intrigues. His attention was trained on couples, vices, crimes, expenditures. He could instantly sniff out the legitimate couples, “mousey-spouseys” to him, and these were intriguing only if they hinted at some louche flaw, rare perversion, drama of the wallet or the groin, all of which were easily detected. Illicit couples, for the most part, offered little of interest. (The hotel was too respectable to let rooms by the hour, with some exceptions; but for the night, one couple’s money is as good as another’s and the gentleman who checks in with a prostitute generally doesn’t look too closely at the little extras on the bill…) But hidden crime, now, crime that ripens all by itself behind an innocently harmless exterior, festering beyond the reach of newspapers, prosecutors, and scandal — there lies the common yet rare substance of human relationships worth studying silently from an observation post like his. Of course, the crasser breed of criminal needs to be screened out in short order, to avoid bad publicity. Guided by intuition alone, one night when business was slow and half the rooms were free, Monsieur Gobfin put on his most ingratiating voice to lament, to the giggly young lady in the expensive straw hat and her small-boned gentleman friend with hair dyed the color of flax, that there was nothing available, and sent them to the competition: “You’ll find it very comfortable there, Madame, Monsieur. They’re even a bit more modern than we are!” (Two days later he learned in Le Petit Parisien of the sudden and suspicious demise of this industrialist from the Rhône, whose mistress was being sought by the prosecutor’s office… It was one of the supreme satisfactions of his life.) He likewise saw off the obese individual bursting with commercial probity — a respected notary, solicitor, company director? — who turned up with a transvestite playing the part of the young mistress to perfection; the competition found itself the scene of an uproarious farce, kept quiet by a hefty sum of hush money. Monsieur Gobfin was only half gratified by this outcome; he took pride in his perspicacity, but missing out on a hefty sum because of it is galling, you have to admit.

Police Inspector Barougeot regularly dropped by around nine a.m., glanced over the registration forms of the foreign guests, scribbled down a name or two for the sake of appearances, and repaired to the dining room in the company of Monsieur Gobfin, where the two of them sat over hot black coffee washed down with a shot of vintage marc. At that hour of the morning, the restaurant was bathed in pleasant white light. Two Englishmen were wolfing down their ham and eggs; an old lady was munching croissants, with a romantic novel by Gabriele d’Annunzio propped open before her. Inspector Barougeot showed Monsieur Gobfin a batch of photographs being circulated by the information and investigation services (as well as a few private agencies). Monsieur Gobfin put two of them aside, not seeming particularly curious about either. “The reward is two thousand francs,” the inspector said. “Skinflint millionaires…” he sighed.

Monsieur Gobfin concealed his nervousness, which turned him yellower. By twenty past one, the need to talk had grown so pressing that he went up to the dining room. Madame Noémi Battisti had just left the table and returned to room 17. Bruno Battisti was reading foreign newspapers and nibbling on raisins and nuts. At the other end of the room, the Negro sitting alone at a table had started his lunch. There were some other, insignificant people, like the man and woman who had business interests in Dijon, and their pale daughter, sapped by solitary vice. With no apparent hesitation, for his hesitation was inner, Monsieur Gobfin toured the tables making a slight bow beside each one, like a head-waiter.

“Monsieur Battisti, isn’t it?” he said. “We trust you find the service to your satisfaction. Today is our day for Burgundian cuisine…”

D had seen him coming. He folded the Berliner Tageblatt.

“Er… yes, an excellent meal, thank you very much… Couldn’t be better.”

Both felt that the emptiness of these words had done nothing to clear the air. Something made each of them hang on to the other. In D’s case, the desire to know “what’s eating this stool pigeon with the face of a worried bedbug” made him adopt a hypocritically debonair expression that was almost engaging. More complex emotions raged within Monsieur Gobfin as he wrestled with indecision, on the brink of small but unknowable risks.

“Why, you haven’t touched your coffee, Monsieur Battistini…” (Was it some kind of a ploy, to mispronounce a name he knew perfectly well?) Have you sampled our vintage marc, Monsieur?”

“Not yet.”

Monsieur Gobfin summoned the waitress. “Elodie, some marc for the gentleman… No, not a shot, bring the decanter…” He hovered between the white tables, a yellow smile suspended between his sunken cheeks. A vague sense of embarrassment gathered with each passing second. “Something’s up,” thought D. “The bedbug’s being too friendly by half…” It was a relief when the amber-filled decanter arrived with its retinue of miniature glasses.

“Let’s try some, then,” said D with composure. “But we must touch glasses together. Please sit down, Monsieur.”

Monsieur Gobfin was only too pleased to accept. The hovering stopped. “If I may be so bold…” The opaque marbles that passed for his pupils probed the room; he sat down so as not to present his back to anyone. “No good lunch is complete without some old marc,” he said meditatively. “That’s what I always say. You be the judge.” At three paces he was no more than unpleasant-looking; at a foot and a half, he looked scrawny and tough, a withered skin stretched over a narrow skull. His personality emerged from a sickly, malevolent weakness. D felt himself observed from all angles and broken down by unknown methods. He glanced ostentatiously at his watch. “Oh, but if you’re in a hurry, Monsieur Battisti…” “No, not at all.” (If I let him go, I’ll never figure it out.)

“The fact is, I’m quite perplexed,” Monsieur Gobfin began.

D appeared to be astonished.

“And why might that be? It’s none of my affair, of course, but since you bring it up…”

“The foreign press is better informed than the Paris papers, I suppose?” asked Monsieur Gobfin, either playing for time or committing a major blunder.

Very significant, that remark. Whenever he scented danger, D became perfectly, sinisterly calm.

“Surely that’s not what’s perplexing you?”

Mr. Gobfin’s wandering gaze locked for a split second onto the eyes of his companion.

“No indeed, Monsieur Battisti, you are an honest man and I don’t need to know you to be convinced of it. A man of experience too.”

All this is recklessly direct. He’s sounding me out. I’ve been nailed. How did They trace me so quickly…? D advanced a clenched, square fist across the table. A clean and daunting fist.

“I certainly hope we’re among honest folk here,” he said. “As for experience, I don’t mind saying I’ve had my share. Some rough experiences… the colonies, and I don’t mind skipping the niceties sometimes. And too bad for people who are a little too smart for their own good.”

Gobfin responded to the veiled threat with rapture.

“Ah, then I made no mistake, Monsieur, in turning to you! I am dreadfully perplexed, and in need of advice.”

“Spit it out,” D said succinctly — perplexed himself.

“It concerns a murder.”

“You know what, I’m not a detective and I don’t care a fig about murders. I’ve seen enough of them. Just forget it. Will that do for advice?”

“No.”

Gobfin drew a small photograph from his cuff — or from a secret pocket in his sleeve, or from his tie, or from his long straight nose with a twist at the end — and flicked it with his finger in the direction of Monsieur Battisti’s fist. It was the picture of a black man, wreathed in a professional smile — the smile of jazz musicians entranced by their own cacophony.

“The murderer.”

This could be a consummately skillful move. D was nonplussed. What could be neater, at the right moment, than to whip out the ace of spades where the ace of clubs was expected?

“So what,” he said, his breathing labored. “There are murderers all over Paris. What’s it to you?”

(Are They about to have me arrested for murder? To request extradition, after framing me? There’s no treaty… but there might be an international police convention I don’t know about… hadn’t thought of that… This Negro fellow might have accomplices, he’s been bribed to accuse me…)

Monsieur Gobfin, having produced his effect — or simply unstoppered by relief — now became garrulous, pouring himself out in breathy tones of irresistible intimacy. “The place de Clichy murder… Come come, Monsieur, you must have read the newspapers, it was exactly a week ago…”

(Exactly a week? I have no alibi, I’ll never be able to say who I was with… We were working on the Crime of the Capital of the World…)

“A young sculptor, queer, you know, very good family, millionaire parents, does that ring a bell?”

“No.”

“Found in his studio, hands tied, throat cut… naked… Now do you see?” “Vaguely…” D searched his memory, at the same time wondering whether it wasn’t a fiction. Adolescence, nakedness, tied hands, he recalled the gist of it or imagined he did. “But between you and me, like I said, I don’t give a good goddamn!”

The “get off my back with your sordid gossip,” clearly implied in that last retort, could scarcely escape the cloying attention of his host. Either because he had made up his mind to persist or because he was just bursting with it, Monsieur Gobfin became even more confidential.

“Look straight ahead. I believe we have the killer.”

The Negro wiped his mouth and inserted a toothpick. His placid stare brushed against the more troubled gaze of Monsieur Battisti. “A trap,” thought D. “They’re both in it together, the black and this creep… To mix me up in some botched arrest — and by mistake — fine jam I’m in.” There was an obvious resemblance between this sharply etched, vigorous, shiny black head and the one in the photo. The living head, with its purplish lips and sharply etched eyes, pure white and pure black, appeared to D is if about to be chopped off. He saw the coppery tint, paler at the cheek-bones — a sign of previous interbreeding, like the delicate ridge of the nose. “The man in the picture is much blacker, I’d say…”

“A trick of the light. The light is behind us. Look at his hand.”

Darker than the face, the big hand curled loosely on the white cloth suggested animal strength refined by the exercise of some craft — a hand deft with a mandolin, a trapeze bar, a sharpened razor… Why not?

“Hmm. An honest hand, why not?” Monsieur Battisti said. “You’re letting your imagination run away with you.” Monsieur Gobfin eyed the clenched fist on their own table and felt an unpleasant intimation of anxiety.

“In short, Monsieur Battisti, what do you think?”

“I’m loath to think anything. Except you should err on the side of caution. A mistake could land you in all kinds of trouble…”

To stand up with no more ado, to say to this groveling sneak, “I’ve had enough. Now get my bill, you’ve thoroughly put me off your grisly fleabag…” — would that be reasonable? D weighed up the unspoken tenors of the conversation. “It needs careful consideration. Do you have any other pictures of the same sort?”

“Not many. The inspector doesn’t like to let them go.”

Mr. Gobfin opened a scuffed leather wallet. First he pulled out the photo of a frail-looking woman, probably blond, pretty, her eyes round with fright. A series of white numbers barred her chest. “Chronic swindler, I know her… She’s awfully nice to me since she learned that I carry this around, if you catch my meaning.”

“Say no more.”

“Her sort, you just got to know how to handle them,” snickered Gobfin, olive-yellow. “Then they’re nice as can be… Here, look, one that came in this morning.”

D recognized himself straightaway. The picture had been snapped in the street without his knowledge. They were taking no chances! Or had I already been spotted? By whom? It was from six months ago, on his return from Madrid, with sixty frames from the Alcántara file rolled into the handle of a shaving brush… “Who is it?” he asked casually. Taken unseen on the big boulevards, the picture showed a man with tortoiseshell glasses and a broad smile, wearing a felt hat that obscured the upper part of his face, the collar of his coat turned up; he was standing beside a car. Beyond was a pharmacy, and two ladies seen from behind… A male shoulder faced the hatted man. Whose? On the back of the picture, in copperplate hand: X, alias Isoray; Marcien, alias Zondero-Ribas; Juan, alias Steklansky; Bronislaw… (1. The photo unquestionably comes from Them, from our people. 2. They haven’t got a more recent one, good. Or They don’t choose to release a clearer one… Good. 3. They haven’t listed my alias as Malinesco, Clément, in order to comb through the flat in peace… Therefore I’m being denounced as an agent of the others… Which others? 4. A useless photo. Only the lower half of the face is at all recognizable.)

“An embezzler?” ventured Monsieur Battisti.

“A suspicious foreigner, suspected spy… You think one of those birds would ever come to a decent unassuming place like this? They stay at palatial hotels.”

Monsieur Gobfin looked Monsieur Battisti straight in the eye for the first time.

“At any rate,” said Battisti lightly, “I think you’re after the wrong Negro.”

“And I,” Gobfin responded, “am almost certain I am not — especially since our little chat. If you’ll excuse me…” The marionette withdrew, leaving after him the image of his politest smile — the smile of a stool pigeon in a dull black suit.

D did not wish to show any sign of alarm: the Battistis remained at the hotel. Past the reception desk, the hallway expanded into a very modest lounge, furnished with a rattan couch and armchairs. A round table was littered with tourist magazines. This inhospitable setting was a good place to observe the outlines of people passing in the street, note the comings and goings on the stairs and elevator, and keep an eye on Monsieur Gobfin. The lounge was rarely vacant. Sometimes there was an ordinary-looking fat gentleman smoking and lolling drowsily over his paper. Sometimes a younger man, pencil in hand, attempting the crossword. Neither was interested in this corner of the world — the bottom of a jar where they were waiting to shrivel dry for all eternity. D settled into an armchair opposite the stout reader. The man blew his nose. Monsieur Gobfin, at his post, unhooked the telephone receiver. “Allo, Félix? Gobfin here. Send us a taxi on the dot of five twenty-five.” An ordinary request to all appearances but which, D noted, contained the figure 525. A female voice rang out shrilly, accompanied by muted trumpets of deliverance: “And you didn’t forget to order me a cab for five thirty?” “Not to worry, Madam, it’ll be here.” Still, five thirty was not 525 and this woman’s car might have been ordered beforehand… The trumpets faded away. The fat man folded his paper and moved off, with a heavy stare at D. He didn’t leave his key at the desk on the way out, passing Monsieur Gobfin without so much as a nod. Rude of him. Should I follow? As D tried to make up his mind, the appearance of Nadine rescued him from a budding obsession, but now Gobfin had picked up the phone again… “Well then,” Nadine said, “are you coming?” D blinked a signal; idly he toyed with his lighter before touching it to the cigarette. Gobfin was calling a Monsieur Stevenson on the line. A novelist’s name that had passed into the public domain, Treasure Island, and this Stevenson in turn will be communicating with a Mr. Milton on the subject of Paradise Lost, you can bet your life. “Yes, sir, I received a wire for you at three forty… Yes, sir…” One hour and forty minutes’ delay in reporting the arrival of a telegram? Fishy, that. And what’s three forty, 340, in code? I’m going crazy, D thought. He went outside. So many people, hard to tell anyone apart. The stout reader was returning to the hotel with a Spanish-looking woman on his arm. “They’re going to bed, that’s all, that’s why he kept his key… Unless he went to fetch her in order to finger me…” The couple, bent forward, dived through the doorway as though headlong into a hole.

It’s not in their interest to have me arrested. After all, I could claim the protection of the French authorities. They’re only trying to locate me, which is worse. And have they? The question mark revolved around Monsieur Gobfin. The pros and cons oscillated evenly, like a pendulum. “Nadine, I need to check the back issues of Le Matin.” The hubbub of the city always comforted D, even if it’s a mistake to feel any safer, any more alone, any more lost on a pavement teeming with lives than behind walls protected by secrecy. It must be that mingling with other men and women restores our means of contact, of direct hand-to-hand combat. A host of random factors can work against the lone figure in the melee. Some of the odds are with him; but when he is pitted against huge, well-equipped organizations, the grim probabilities outweigh the lucky chances. All the same, big-city streets — sown with traps though they might be — appeared to give D the initiative. The city dweller, even when invisibly surrounded, relies upon himself at every turn. He reacts to encounters with the life-preserving ingenuity of a beast in its native forest, that sees a bolt-hole in every bush — a cruel illusion, if the beaters have done their job. But the hunters are also sure to make mistakes, and if their quarry doesn’t panic, there’s always a chance of salvation. What sets man apart from beasts is that humans have the option not to panic.

The presses were humming quietly in the Matin offices, a glass-walled building painted a dirty red. Bruno Battisti quickly tracked down what he was looking for in the volumes of recent issues — the crime, not on place de Clichy but on a street off place Blanche, a murder needlessly illustrated with a picture that suggested a big cockroach squashed onto the page. A teenager’s body stretched prone, arms flung forward, lashed together at the wrists. Beneath the throat the sheets were stained black. The reporter, a pseudo-cultured hack, described the victim as “a disciple of the British aesthete Oscar Wilde, whose scabrous misdoings were the talk of the town in his day…” Stupid! Stupid! The reference to a “mysterious black dancer” cleared Monsieur Gobfin of the mists of suspicion.

“All’s well, Nadine. Do you want to go out and find some distraction tonight?”

“It won’t be easy,” replied the young woman, smiling gamely. “If you wish.”

Out of habit he turned to the classified ads, which he hadn’t checked since making the break. And the appeal he found there hit him like a blow in the chest. “JOSSELINE begs Yves to write. Urgent. Overwhelmed grief. Faithful.”

“Nadine, there’s a message from Daria…”

“I think we can trust her, Sacha…”

We can trust no one any longer. No one will trust us, ever again. That terrible bond, that most salutary of human bonds, those invisible threads of gold and light and blood attaching men sworn to a common endeavor — those bonds, we’ve broken them, and suspicion had already broken them before, we never knew how… “You’ve no idea. There’s no trust left in the world. Everything has collapsed. We were trust. We thought we understood the ways of history and were participants in it… And what are we? Wake up to the reality…”

But D stopped himself from saying this aloud. The Porte Saint-Martin, a shabby looming shape, resembled a triumphal arch dedicated to forgotten victories. Its old stone flanks were corroded up to arm’s reach by a whitish mold made of soggy old handbills and ads. That’s as high as the bill-posters could reach in their search for a pittance — or a steak — ready to pick it out of the gutter if necessary. Let’s not be fastidious! A third of the dressmakers, florists, and seamstresses who advertise for apprentices and part-time female employees have connections to a brothel, or at least to prime stretches of asphalt. Cabinetmakers’ notices are honest, as are cycle-repair signs (though these are a lure to bicycle thieves); but why can’t a pretty girl set herself up as a cabinetmaker? Nearing place de la République, the first lamps of dusk gleamed through a drifting grisaille that was sweet to see and breathe. Like a coward, D reproached himself with having — out of a moral reflex — revived a broken contact… .Daria’s call rose through him from the richest, purest, most distant sediment of the past. Yes, there are sediments that are pure, even beneath cruelty.

“I won’t have time to see her,” he told Nadine, rehearsing an excuse for himself. “We’re off in five days.”

“Do whatever it takes, Sacha, you can’t abandon her like that! She’s no threat.”

Five days, and the page will be turned. The neon signs of Paris bursting magically into life — all of them advertising businesses, many of them dirty, deadly businesses — merged together into a great fantastical poem. The little café bars and their friendly clientele, the metal cubicles on the sidewalk showing the trouser hems of pissing men (drink, citizens, piss, citizens, there are good things in life, why hold back? It’s fine to proclaim this along the boulevards!), the windows of clockmakers, cobblers, and booksellers, the elaborate foodstuffs, the color postcards full of gross jokes and sexual innuendo, all this bespeaks a vulgar, proud civilization, an extremely comfortable one too, in which human beings have attained the maximum possible degree of self-indulgence, and thus the height of freedom, of relaxation… A dangerous thing, relaxation… One of the charms of Paris, unique in the world, is that people here neglect ferociousness — that power — and the organized brutality that drives great empires. A grandeur of another order is germinating here in the very rottenness (all social grandeurs are rooted in a compost of decay), ahead of its time. We may pay dearly for this clumsy attempt at a human life, more human than ever… The six-story apartment houses were conglomerations of walled-off lives: dramatic, well-fed, grossly carnal yet exquisitely sentimental at times, curiously spiritual; in the vast place de la République, with its dingy affluence and bad lighting, Yiddish was heard as often as French and the floozies parading under terrace awnings were plebeians, servants gone over to the love trade, to another form of service… The blackened statue, stone and bronze, bronze blossoming from stone, of a solitary, decorative, and disarmed Marianne, stood ignored by the streams of people following their interwoven pathways around her feet. And no one gives a shit! That’s one way — perhaps the most genuine way — of being republicans…

In a few days’ time this will be the past, superimposed upon other poignant images more irrevocably gone. The Tower of the Savior and the Tower of the Dog… The delicate gray monastery, the flat colonnade of Smolny… What will become of Paris, what will become of our towers?

“I’ll take you to the Left Bank, Nadine, how about it? Don’t be depressed… The champagne’s on me.”

But it was he who felt depressed. Daria’s appeal reopened severed veins, poorly sutured. The veins of memory which no mental surgery can close.

In the beginning was surprise that enthusiasm could exist, that the new faith could be stronger than all else, action more desirable than happiness and ideas more real than old facts; that the world could be more alive than the self. The commissariat of an army in rags demanded uniforms — or any kind of clothing — for the worker and peasant battalions. (And let’s not forget the battalions of pickpockets, con men, burglars, convicts, and pimps, no worse than the rest…) The regional commissar rolled his r’s, the marbles of his eyes, his shoulders, his hips, whatever moved in that fleshy ex-acrobat’s body, and he would say, “With six weeks’ training I’ll shape you the dregs of the dregs into near-palatable machine-gun fodder, with a few heroes left over… I’ve got four decent noncoms and a captain of the old regime trained up like circus poodles. But I need britches! You can fight gloriously for the Revolution with no courage, no officers, no maps, and close to no ammo. The enemy’s got all of that, you just go and take it from him. But you can’t fight with nothing to cover your ass. Britches, that’s the first condition of victory!” An erudite listener objected, through an interpreter: “What about the sansculottes of the French Revolution…?” “They wore long pants!” I was put in charge of supplying local manufacturers with material. I intervened forcefully, because pants would require more cloth than reasonably short breeches. I went to the socialized factory. A broad country road, lined with pastel-painted cottages enclosed by fences and trees, led to the bleak edge of town. Here the steppe began, the sky resting flat on the featureless land. The redbrick factory breathed neglect through shattered windowpanes; the holes in the picket fence gaped brokenly onto yards turned to waste grounds and on the black forests of the horizon. This palisade shrank a little every night, as the townsfolk scavenged the planks to restock their woodpiles. The half-dead factory filled me with a kind of revulsion. I knew that a tiny but invincible fungus was devouring the floorboards; that of the four hundred women in the workforce, fewer than half spun out days of hunger and bitter inactivity on the premises. Old women with no ties to life, war widows, mothers of vanished soldiers who might at this moment be roaming the highways of a world in thrall to the Antichrist. Their cow once bartered away, their dog stolen, their cat strangled by some Kalmuck, I could imagine how such women might have lost their last apparent reason for living had they not come here, propelled by a kind of somnambulism, to sit before the workbenches and sewing machines with their hands clasped on their laps as they told each other their troubles. More inexplicable were the emaciated, sly young women who came in to steal the last reels of cotton, odd needles, and pieces of drive belt, a booty they squirreled away between their thighs for fear of being frisked… The winters of this town were arctic, the rations meaner than anywhere else (every town claimed this distinction, and perhaps every town was right, contrary to common sense), and the social consciousness matched the conditions. I entered, as one enters a deserted windmill. A phantom opulence clung to the director’s office; the green desktop baize was torn, the couch broken, the dwarf palm dead in its pot since last winter. A slip of a girl met me with a brusque: “What do you want, Citizen? I’m busy.” In those days I always looked closely at women… This one wore a brown woolen skirt, a leather jacket, a fine wool shawl around her head and neck, and oversize boots. Monastic. Beneath her heavy garb I guessed her to be small-boned and neat, I sensed her chastity. Her pale oval face was drawn and yet charming. Blue lids, long lashes, strictness. Plain or pretty, I couldn’t decide. “The committee secretary?” I hazarded. “That’s me,” said Daria. “I am the committee. The others are half-wits and loafers.” I explained my mission. Checks, controls, imperative requirements on behalf of the Regional Economic Committee by virtue of the powers conferred by the central authority, military supply requirements; compulsory duty to inform the People’s Tribunals about any acts of sabotage, even if involuntary, and to report the least lapses to the Special Repression Commission… “Fine,” Daria said, without troubling to conceal her irritation, “but all your orders, threats, red tape, and tribunals won’t get you one blessed breeches leg stitched. And I warn you, in case you’re the arresting sort: you won’t take a single one of my people away unless you throw me in jail first. Even though they’re all thieves except me. Now let’s be clear: production is getting off the ground. The factory is working, insofar as a factory that’s four-fifths wrecked can be said to work. Come on, I’ll show you.” One hundred and fifty workers were apparently engaged in doing something… Indeed I heard, with a strange rush of delight, the purring of the machines. Stoves crackled hotly in some of the workshops, fed with doors and floorboards from the others. Four hundred breeches, and the same number of smocks and tunics, were pledged for the following week. Daria’s young voice was hoarse with a mixture of apology and defiance. “We can go on like this for three or four months. I burn moldy floorboards from the disused workshops. That’s illegal, I don’t have the permit from the Nationalized Companies Conservation Commission. I sell one-fifth of the output to the peasants, plus defective items, which means I can provide potatoes for the workforce. That’s illegal too, Comrade. I pay for sixty percent of my raw-materials allowance in kind — illegal. I provide a weekly ration of red or white wine to pregnant women, convalescents, over forty-fives, and anyone who’s clocked in ten days running, to everyone, really. That’s probably illegal… And I send cases of cognac to the president of the Special Repression Commission, to keep myself out of jail.” “That’s certainly illegal,” I said. “Requisitioned wines and spirits are to be placed at the disposal of the Public Health Bureau… So what’s your source for all this liquid fuel?” “My father’s bourgeois cellars,” she said, reddening slightly. “My father is a worthy liberal who can’t make head or tail of anything; he fled…” Thus Daria at nineteen — with the eyes of seventeen — in the year 1919, during the time of famine and terror. We walked through workshops buzzing with activity, and others where we could see the flagstones of the ground floor through the holes… And I sent her, both in the same envelope, a pile of proletarian denunciations directed against “the pernicious counter-revolutionary sabotage and waste carried out by the daughter of the former capitalist exploiter of the masses, et cetera” and a Certificate of Constructive Illegality.

In the year ’22, after a good deal of throat cutting, I ran into her again at Feodossia, tending to her lungs which she said were “as wrecked as the floors of that factory, do you remember?” and striving to keep a glimmer of life going in the body of a scrawny baby girl, ten months old, who was soon to die. Daria was a director of schools, “no paper, no books, twice the children, half the teachers” and those at their wits’ end. Hunger; two successive waves of terror. Premature aging had spoiled the childish charm of her youthful looks; her nose was pinched, her lips drained of color, her mouth twisted slightly out of line. I found her obtuse, almost stupid, with an edge of hysteria, one cool night on a pebbly strand bewitched by the most sparkling stars, when I tried to dispel the bitterness I perceived in her by defending the Party’s behavior… Forehead banded by a black lace scarf, hands on knees, squatting on her heels like a sulky tomboy, Daria answered me curtly, clipping her phrases as she would have coldly ripped up the beliefs without which we could not have lived: “Spare me the theoretical considerations. And the lofty quotations out of books! I’ve seen the massacres. Theirs and ours. Them, they’re made for that, the rubbish of history, the debased humanity of drunken officers… But us, if we’re no different, then it’s a betrayal. We’ve betrayed plenty, I can tell you. See that rock out there? Officers trussed together, driven with sabers to the edge of the cliff. I saw men falling in bunches, like big crabs… There are too many psychopaths on our side… Our side? What do I have in common with them? And you? Don’t answer. What do they have in common with socialism? Keep your mouth shut, or I’ll leave.”

I kept my mouth closed. Then she let me put an arm around her shoulders, I felt her thinness, I squeezed her to me in a rush of affection, I only wanted to make her warmer, she froze. “Leave off, I’m not a woman anymore…” “A great big child is what you are and always have been, Daria,” I told her, “a wonderful child…” She shoved me so violently, I almost lost my balance. “Be a man, then! And keep your platitudes for a more appropriate time.” We remained good friends. We took long hikes over the parched Greek hills of Feodossia. A kindly sun warmed the curves of the rock, the sea was incredibly blue, the horizons of the parched land were turning green. Great birds with azure plumage more shimmering than the sea alighted close to us from time to time, inquisitively. “Not a hunter, are you?” Daria asked. “Don’t you want to shoot at it?” She buried her baby, cured her lungs, rebuilt her morale.

At a Trade Mission soiree in Berlin, there she was, looking elegant and youthful, her health restored. She was attached to a clandestine branch that took care of certain prisoners; having grown up with French and German governesses, she was able to pose as the wife of the political prisoners she visited. The jails of the Weimar Republic were tolerably good, in keeping with a judicious liberalism comfortably greased by dollars. “What do you think of those men, Daria?” “I think they’re admirable and mediocre. I like them. Nothing great will be achieved through the likes of them.” Her white teeth were laughing. We were of one mind about the frailties of the West: its deep-seated habits of selfishness, its total oblivion to the implacable rigors of History, its fetishization of money, its craven slippage toward disaster due to the fear of taking risks… Its absurd belief that things will always die down so that people can go on living. “Whereas we,” Daria said, “we know how inhuman the dying-down can be… That’s what makes us superior.” A year’s prison sentence, served in Central Europe, spared her the heartache of our first internal crises.

And years later, we were walking along Kurfürstendamm toward Am Zoo, through the flurry, the luxury, the bright lights and ready pleasures of Berlin at midnight. Here and there a jobless man slunk through the cosseted throng of men with porcine rolls for necks and she-grenadiers covered in furs. Girls with painted faces — the only attractive creatures in sight — mimicked the airs of perverse young men. Daria burst out: “Our unemployed are going over to the Nazis, who buy them bread and boots… How do you think it’s going to end?” “In apocalyptic slaughter…” We saw each other in Paris, Brussels, Liège, Stuttgart, Barcelona… Daria married a construction engineer who got caught up in a purge of technicians; she divorced. “He’s honest, but stubborn. We don’t build as others do, we build the way you put up concrete bunkers on the front line… He’ll never grasp that reason and justice take second place to efficiency, and as we’re sacrificing millions of peasants, we can’t appear to be letting the technicians off…” I was glad to hear her being so sensible. As the dark years wore on, those of us working with the secret services abroad were in no position to know or sense everything that was going on. We heard of new towns rising on lands which only yesterday lay fallow, of automobile, aluminum, aviation, and chemical industries developed in less than five years… On the banks of a Meuse river clad in gray silk, outside the stern old Maison Curtius washed up there like a stone coffer full of the wealth of an artisan people, Daria lectured me on the by-products of the tinplate industry. “Production will bring about justice. The rational exploitation of by-products is more important, in the short term, than ideological errors or judicial excesses. All those faults can be rectified over time, so long as there are enough little medicine tins being made… And if political reputations are unjustly damaged along the way, well, that’s secondary, don’t you think?” I was the one nagged by doubt. Should one not, while attending to all those pillboxes and blast furnaces, have a thought for man? A thought for the poor devil of today, for the occasionally great poor devil, who cannot content himself with straining under the yoke while waiting for tomorrow’s medicines and railway lines? — The end justifies the means, what a swindle. No end can be achieved by anything but appropriate means. If we trample on the man of today, will we do anything worthwhile for the man of tomorrow? And what will we do to ourselves? But I was grateful to Daria for not doubting, at least not overtly.

When our blood began splattering the front page of every newspaper and flowing down every sewer, Daria seemed to me to get older; she put on the expression of an embittered nun with that pursed, slightly skewed mouth, and we avoided all talk of what would have made us lie and dissemble for safety’s sake, or question everything and feel helpless, and admit that our very horror of treachery was tempting us to flee, to betray… We chatted about films and music. But once, in a cinema on the Champs-Élysées, Daria had a nervous breakdown. She seemed to be sobbing over the tragedy of Mayerling… It was right after the secret execution of the twenty-seven.

The beat of the tom-tom filled the cellar with a hectic panting. It projected an anxious din of constant celebration against the empty night; a clamor reverberating under the low vaults of the ceiling. Brown-skinned men dressed in white whipped their African instruments into an exultant frenzy. The glare of a naked lightbulb exposed sinewy arms, gleaming teeth, and the animal sadness beneath their impudent laughter. This group blocked the entrance to a private room, where a party was in full swing. A sallow boy in pantaloons and fez was carrying in a tray of liqueurs. The youngest of the musicians plunged into this secret redoubt in one effete, athletic bound… The club’s public section, linked to the street by a narrow flight of steps which one could only descend bent double, feeling along the lime-washed walls, imitated a rather dingy Algerian café, partitioned by the cellar structure into a dim maze of booths where groups and couples sat on benches covered with old carpets. The torrent of barbaric rhythms, slamming from wall to wall in brutal waves, invaded brains, throats, nerves, and eyeballs like an elementary toxin.

“I’ve been thinking about Daria and you’re right, Nadine, I have to see her.”

They were coming to the end of a depressing evening during which they had steered clear of bright plazas, cinemas, cafés, and boulevards so as not to tempt the fate that presides over chance encounters. Here they felt secure, protected by darkness as they huddled close together under a low arch; all they could see clearly of the booth next door was a pair of long legs sheathed in black silk fishnets. A woman with a mane of orange hair lay flung back against the indistinct body of a man. The reddish tip of her cigarette traveled slowly from fingers to lips. Curlicues of smoke rose and mingled under the vault. Whenever the drumming was interrupted, silence burst like a breaker exploding into countless droplets of spray; the head filled with throbbing emptiness like an undersea cave… Fortunately, this emptiness never lasted long before the trance returned.

Nadine turned an imploring face toward Sacha’s shoulder.

“Do we have to go back to that horrid hotel? It spooks me. As late as possible, Sacha.”

“But it’s a perfectly nice hotel! What more could you ask?”

“Tell me about that murder in the newspaper which interested you so much.”

“Which didn’t interest me at all, you mean. I was trying to put together a few dates”

Nadine hugged up against him. “I can’t tell you how fed up I am with murders. I see their shadow everywhere. I fancy the passengers in the Métro are thinking about murder. Some are afraid, watchful, agitated, everyone’s caught in a huge dragnet… Will it ever end?”

The stifled, stifling din of the tom-toms bore down on them with all its beneficial weight. D sniffed the air saturated with noise, smoke, breath, mold, and perspiration. The Berbers or Arabs who were making this music, the music of an oasis in heat, exuded a muscular joy… Here’s something that cerebral people have lost: the elation of leaping around a bonfire to the cadence of drums, the intoxication of feeling alive, simply. This loss must result in many strangely disastrous crimes…

“Nadine, for us it’ll be finished in just a few days.”

D was thinking: “Unless it is we who are finished… Anyway we remain on the level of victims… A semi-deliverance already… I hate the role of victim — only the opposite is worse. A necessity that resembles complicity often binds a victim to his torturer, the man on the scaffold to his executioner… It’s an unhealthy notion… Nemesis…” During the days when we were performing so many terrible deeds in order to lay the foundations of a different future, we regarded ourselves as righteous. For it was we who sought to break the vicious circle of warfare and man’s dehumanization at the hands of man. And yet we had sporadic intimations, without admitting the idea, that we deserved to be punished… That our attempts to outwit the logic of blood were merely dragging us more deeply into it. Should we have opted, then, for nonviolence? If only it were possible! (The shape of a long-dead comrade, fallen at the Far Eastern front and buried beneath the snow with what humble military honors we could provide, derisory materialist speeches of “Eternal in our memory, brother!” — this outline appeared on the inner screen. A fine, leonine figure of a man, who emerged from a victory followed by mass executions, bellowing like a drunken prophet: “Just wait and see, my friends! Winners or losers, ten months, ten years from now, we’ll all wind up shot! Necessarily.” We flung a bucket of cold water over him. The eldest of our company, reputed to be a sage, was muttering: “Nemesis.” I flew into a rage. “What does old Greek mythology — the devil take it — have to do with our Marxist revolution?” This old comrade cursed me for a fool. He was the author of long, remarkable books on the problem of culture. The books were banned. The author died of scurvy in sub-Arctic latitudes where neither knowledge nor ideas, nor culture, nor authentic stoicism are worth a warm reindeer skin.)

A dancing girl from south of Oran came in. (The reindeer civilization knew Greek dances from the Black Sea region… FinnoUgrian, Mongol, and Scythian women re-created the magic dances of the Ionian Isles… And what of the continuity, the human constant that is dance… Something to think about.) She was a vigorous dark girl, almost black, but amber-black, high-waisted, and wide-hipped, whose muscles in repose played softly beneath the skin. A saffron turban wound about her head, her full breasts held by a band of raw silk, a low-slung skirt falling to her bare toes, she began by sending out slow currents with the undulations of her cool, strong arms. Her navel quivered, and the smooth dark stomach became a concentrated vortex of female vitality. The heavy face, set into an inert smile, conveyed nothing but the blankness of animal beatitude. D observed her from a distance at first — from a different bend of the single spiral along which we all move. Gorgeous creature sold to our gazes, help me banish the troubles, the memories, the worry, and the bitterness that rise from my belly, just as the oldest temptation rises from yours! I thank you. The dancer, standing stretched like invisible palm fronds, let herself be borne upward by a lascivious violence. Belly, hips, and eyes quickened into rapture, agleam with sweat. Her arms flew up to undo the turban which now she tied around her haunches like a sash, forming a big rose of saffron silk that flicked between her thighs. She fell to her knees and arched her back, miming the swoon of passion.

“Has this splendid escapade lightened your mood, Nadine? Shall we go?”

They left the cellar. The street was deep in its midnight reverie. They paused at the gates of the Luxembourg to look in at the sleeping garden, utterly different from its luminous or hazy daytime self. A whiff of decay drifted from piles of dead leaves. Bare boughs peopled the darkness, striking motionless poses without shadow or duration.

“The future,” Nadine said.

D seized her brusquely by the wrists.

“I didn’t know you were so weak. I forbid you to be like this. What are you afraid of? Being killed, like so many others? It would only be a relief. I tell you we’re starting our life over again — blindly. All we ever worked for was life, in the end, we’ve got a right to it.”

Emerging out of the asphalt and the shadows a shuffling form approached: it was an old man in a dented felt hat, leaning on a cane. A hoarse voice spoke to them softly from the depths of weariness: “Ya’ shounna make a scene ’frunna the little lady, M’sieur. What can she do about it? Don’t you agree?”

“Hear that?” D exclaimed, “the night itself is speaking to us… What can you do about it?”

The limping form passed on, leaving a trail of words waning behind. “Course night shpeaks sometimes, why shounna it shpeak, night? Gotta be…”

Nadine and D burst into laughter together. Let’s go home. The cafés threw their cozy glow across the intersection. At the end of rue Soufflot, the peristyle of the Panthéon guarded a necropolis eerily blanketed in mists, but life, simple and unadorned, retained its usual charm along the boulevard Saint-Michel.

Precaution might be regarded as an abstract, practical science, analogous to geometry (the non-Euclidean kind, needless to say). Given irregular surface A, bounded by mobile straight and curved lines D (for danger), insert point Z, likewise mobile, into one or more zones W (work) at the greatest possible distance from lines D… Bear in mind as you perform this exercise that the dynamics of the problem include unknown quantities O and I, pertaining to a fourth dimension that corresponds to enemy levels of organization and intelligence. Further bear in mind the fifth dimension P, for psychology: nerves, fear, betrayal; and, lastly, random elements X. To all these oppose dimension U (us), comprised of our own organization, our own intelligence, our own nerve. From now on, as far as D was concerned, the seventh dimension U was coterminous with the fourth, fifth, and sixth! Point Z was left with nothing to guide his movements but a demagnetized compass. No support from any quarter, and everything to fear from the services to which he so recently belonged. As days went by they were regrouping, positioning their guns, spreading their nets. It was impossible to guess what they knew, what orders they would receive, how they would plan to strike. The hypothesis of calculated inaction, however implausible, could not be ruled out. In formal terms, D’s resignation infringed none of the articles of the special law that entailed the death penalty; but resignation was not envisaged by any of them. An unwritten law dictated the elimination of agents who were guilty of grave disobedience, and disapproval of the regime was the worse disobedience of all, implying the revolt of that metaphysical X — personal conscience — whose mere existence could not be brooked, for it would pull down the whole edifice of what we called “iron discipline” and others called, “corpse’s discipline.” As a citizen, D came within the scope of legal provisions for the punishment (death, without trial, on simple proof of identity) of soldiers deserting abroad, even in peacetime. He knew all about the ruling psychoses, for he was standing up against them. The notion that a man might bow out without betraying, as faithfully as it were humanly possible (the vagueness of that formula!), faithful to the extreme of objecting to the intolerable, and its destruction of us; that a man might withdraw only to vanish into insignificance, well, any of his chiefs willing to believe that would be deemed a lunatic, or an accomplice to be liquidated without delay.

He discovered that the absolute of trust no longer existed for him. Without that unshakable feeling, clandestine work would be impossible. Trust that the Organization would never let you down; that no matter what the crisis, no matter how acute, the Organization would never cease to weave its tight defensive web around you; that each and every member of the Organization, regardless of personal feelings, would accomplish his anonymous duty toward you; that the top of the hierarchy was staffed by leaders wielding infinite powers of secrecy and authority to ensure that no one came to grief, save at the behest of the most supreme necessity; the confident knowledge of these things endowed one, amid all the risks of the profession, with a victorious sense of security. (“None of us will perish, except by his own fault or at our hands!” one chief had proclaimed. “There is no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle!”) And D had served some fifteen years in a dozen countries, including that terrifying wasps’ nest, the Third Reich, where all the sappers were themselves sapped with diabolical meticulousness…

Now his rendezvous with Daria was causing him small but insoluble problems. He had no doubt that she could be trusted, that she must be going through a phase of deep distress, that she was bound to him by a friendship more definitive than love. But, for those very reasons, she might herself be caught in an invisible net. Behind a front of desperate hypocrisy she too had begun to break away. They suspected it, because no serious assignments had been entrusted to her for six months. “Take some time off,” they said, “you deserve it after all you went through in Spain…” Eventually he settled on a plan. He would telephone Daria and give her fifteen minutes to get to an address on the reliably uncrowded rue des Saints-Pères. We’ll synchronize our watches and I’ll pick her up in a taxi and take her… where? The most convenient place would be a room in a discreet hotel. But though she’s no prude, Daria might well feel offended by the awkward pretense of a lovers’ tryst. And chambermaids have been known to eavesdrop, and walls have peepholes, cleverly drilled by silent voyeurs… We’d look like the most suspicious old couple, drawn by neither pleasure nor vice, brother and sister, ravaged by mutual confessions… Paris, for all its bottomless resources, had no haven to offer to a farewell meeting that boded nothing but desolate frankness.

D ruled out museums, churches, railway stations, squares, parks, both the Buttes-Chaumont and Monceau, tempting though they were; it might rain and the November cold was biting; it would be so melodramatically glum that they might just as well go to PèreLachaise, or make one last pilgrimage to the Mur des Fédérés — fortunate Communards, to die with all the future before them! Hang the weather and what it might do. He wanted the open air. We’ll go to the Jardin des Plantes. The small cafés around the botanical gardens have quiet back rooms that are often sought by troubled couples. The most dramatic marital scenes, played out in low voices, shock neither the waitress nor the patronne who keep a sly watch on the proceedings, hoping for another banal tragedy to be splashed over next day’s paper: STAR-CROSSED LOVERS SINK IN SEINE or AFTER SHOOTING FAITHLESS LOVER, WOMAN TURNS GUN ON SELF. The headlines come to life when you recognize the photos. That’s them, they were at the far table, remember? The dark-haired girl, with the cruel lips, “I said to myself at the time…” Such strokes of luck are rare. Most couples make up, or annihilate each other in ways that provide no pickings for crime reporters.

Narrow walks sprinkled with clean gravel stretched through the Ornamental Shrub Nursery, the Pod-Bearing Trees Nursery… The rusted shrubs, white sky, and rectilinear lines enclosed a shrunken landscape. Daria said, “I’ve brought you a message from Krantz.”

Unexpected. Terrible. Had Daria appealed to him on orders, rather than in distress? Was he walking into a trap?

“Krantz? He’s in Paris?”

“Don’t worry, just a tour of inspection. It was him who got your letter.”

(“He had no right to open it… Or every right, perhaps…”)

“I work with him. He knows we’re friends. He was so understanding about it… I didn’t know there was such kindness in him. He said to me, ‘Poor fellow! His service record is outstanding, we’ll fix him up with a special posting in the Far East. The war is coming, and we lack men of his caliber. Find him if it’s the last thing you do… Tell him he has nothing to fear for the moment, I have a lot of pull and I’ll stand up for him. His nerves have given way. Do you think mine are in good shape? And I won’t inquire after the state of yours… These are terrible times we’re living in, rife with wickedness, we need blind faith and boundless energy or else we’re lost, I mean all is lost, because him or you or me, we hardly matter! I can still burn his letter and persuade them to be lenient. He can’t remain abroad of course, but I promise him a challenging job in strategic economics, good hard work a long way away. They’ll forget all about him, and then they’ll reward him, and one day he’ll thank me for having saved him from himself…’ So there you are. Krantz begs you to meet him, just for an hour. I believe he means it…”

“You do…?”

D’s blood ran cold. He shouldn’t have met with her! Pure sentimentality — idiotic — the memories, the heroic years, and the rest, a quagmire. How many times has Krantz delivered himself of similar speeches? And how many dupes and dead men does that make? And if he does mean it, which he might, is the system equally sincere? The system doesn’t give a hoot for the sincerity of a Krantz, it goes its own way. Good job I only gave Daria twenty minutes to get dressed and meet me, or she could have alerted the whole pack for all I know. She did have time to phone… A stooped figure turning the corner into their path riveted D’s attention, until he saw the small boy who caught up and clung to his grandfather’s hand. D’s ideas went off on a new tack. Informed by Krantz, Daria is now hopelessly compromised and she knows it. What fate can she expect? Unless she moves against me, no-holds-barred. That would be her only lifeline, and a precarious one at that. D feigned assent.

“Krantz is a very fine comrade.” (To himself: How has he survived so long?) “I don’t have to tell you, Dacha, how hard these last days have been…”

He turned toward her with a wry smile on his face. “You know, I was in a cabaret the other night, and there was this big girl singing a soppy love song:

“Somehow it stuck with me — though I’m not the sentimental type — and I sent her a bouquet, with a card from my next-to-last alias. Red roses, naturally.”

He couldn’t meet her steady gray eyes.

“I’ll see Krantz, he’ll burn my letter, and I’ll go home. If I’m brought before the disciplinary council, I can bank on ten years — without the letter. Rehabilitation through labor, that’s what I’d like. If Krantz is as influential as he claims, I’ll put in for a navigational job on some great Arctic shipping route…”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. This garden’s like a cemetery. Let’s go a café downtown. No need to hide anymore. You’re my salvation, Dacha, and I’m glad it was you. You, the same as in Feodossia… I’m very tired, you know…”

“Don’t do it,” said Daria sharply.

The same, indeed, as in the old days. Her child-nun face scarcely marked around the eyes and the corners of the lips by the hardship of living. Hardening.

“Krantz can’t help you — no one can. If you go home you’re lost… You’d be lost even if you’d done nothing. And I’m probably as doomed as you are.”

They were face-to-face and he impulsively moved closer.

“Then let me be the one to save you. Come to us. Wherever we find a safe haven, I’ll call you.”

“You do me so much good,” she said, enlightened.

D was already regretting his impulse. His apprehensions had been turned around too simply. How to see into the true depths of another person? He had flipped from humiliating mistrust into effusive fondness.

Boulevard de l’Hôpital has little character. One trudges past drab buildings, factories, the Salpêtrière, to the noise of locomotive whistles from the nearby station. There are brewery trucks, cement mixers, Maggi dairy vans, railroad trucks; a Cadillac, here, would stand out like a lady in a haute couture outfit from the place Vendôme. The space is vast and colorless. Events there must be commonplace, like registered trademarks, without the pathos of luxury. There Daria and D found a secluded café with tan leather upholstery, brightened by blue piping. “When, if ever,”Daria wondered, “will there be bars like this at home, so cozy and unpretentious that you don’t even notice?”

“When we’re dead. We had not the faintest inkling of the sweat, blood, and shit that go into forging a people’s well-being…”

“Careful. You’re sounding like a big capitalist. Don’t you think what’s needed is a greater effort of generosity and intelligence? The days of primitive accumulation are behind us.”

“Not in our country. And the days of destruction lie ahead.”

Thus they embarked on the double monologue around a common obsession they share with other troubled minds. “For two years now, I’ve been living in a kind of dark hallucination,” Daria said. “Me too…” “You know that business of the embezzlement of Forest Trust funds, part of some dirty scheme, I forget which? Well, I happened to be involved, I carried a part of the funds, I know where they were going and on whose orders! And there was the Fat Man confessing his head off, spewing his poisonous drivel left, right, and center, poor fellow, what they reduced him to! I read the papers, listened to the radio, heard his voice, plausibly delirious, began to doubt reality, I couldn’t look people in the face, I went through the streets covered in shame… I tried so hard to understand. Is it possible to understand? Please, Sacha, don’t put on that hangdog suicidal look.”

“Suicidal, did you say? On the contrary, I’m fighting to stay alive in order to understand, to witness the next chapter and the epilogue… Could we have got it horribly wrong on some hidden point? I don’t think so. The planned, centralized, rationally administered economy is still superior to any other model. Thanks to that, we survived in circumstances that would have made short work of any other regime… But a rational administration must be humane. Can inhumanity be rational?”

“Sacha, I’m going to ask you a question that might seem thoughtless or infantile, but listen to it anyway. Didn’t we forget man and the soul? Which are perhaps the same thing…”

“We did, because first we forgot our own selves. Individualism — once you get beyond the crude Darwinian law of the war of all against all — is no more than a sorry delusion. And by overcoming it, we were able to raise up a heavy piece of the world, able to become better, more energetic people. That’s why my heart is with those who have forgotten their very names and won’t appear in the history books, either, after serving as the catalyst for events that will never be fully understood, since the people who brought them about will remain unknown… Our unpardonable error was to believe that what they call soul — I prefer to call it conscience — was no more than a projection of the old superseded egoism. If I’m still alive, it’s because I realized that we misrepresented the grandeur of conscience. You don’t have to tell me about the deformed or rotten or spineless consciences, the blind consciences, the half-blind consciences, the intermittent, flickering, comatose consciences! And spare me the conditioned reflexes, glandular secretions, and assorted complexes of psychoanalysis: I’m all too aware of the monsters swarming in the primeval slime, deep inside me, deep inside you. There’s a stubborn little glimmer all the same, an incorruptible light that can, at times, shine through the granite that prison walls and tombstones are made of; an impersonal little light that flares up inside to illuminate, judge, refute, or wholly condemn. It is no one’s property and no machine can take the measure of it; it often wavers uncertainly because it feels alone — what brutes we’ve been, to let it die in its solitude!”

“This little light of yours has been around a long time, in literature. Tolstoy says something about ‘the light shining through the darkness… ’”

“Wrong, Dacha. the Apostle John said it before him, and he can’t have been the first… I’m going off the rails into metaphysics and mysticism, aren’t I? Go on, say it, your eyes are laughing at me… We committed a mortal error, materially mortal I mean, leading to countless heads blown apart by executioners’ bullets, when we forgot that only this form of conscience can accomplish the reconciliation of man with himself and with others, and keep a watch on the old beast that’s ever ready to be reborn, equipped with the latest political machinery… Our language has separate words to denote objective consciousness and moral conscience — as though the one could subsist without the other! I’ve boned up on the relevant literature. Some scholarly authors define such phenomena as a superego that precedes the individual. Let’s not be afraid of psychological definitions, anymore than we are of ghosts. We successfully blasted the social superego with the existing artillery; empire, property, money, dogma, oppression, all were blown away. It should have meant the release of what is best in man, but that got smashed along with everything else, I fear. And we’ve become the captives of a new prison, more rationally conceived in appearance but more crushing in reality, because its foundations are firmer… Empire, dogmas, and all the rest were soon reconstructed on planned machinery, while conscience died out… I’m getting out. I’m escaping. You must escape too.”

“Be still for a moment, I beg you,” Daria whispered, “people are looking.”

D was speaking this way for the first time in his life, and it helped him to see more clearly; he felt new strength surging through him. But anxiety transmits itself in subtle ways, and he was as quickly overtaken by despondency. “What are we escaping to? I’m talking as though one could escape into space. The whole edifice is collapsing, and the only certainty is the coming war which will be continental, intercontinental, chemical, satanic. We’ll be left to ruminate sullenly in our corner, isolated, unknown, and useless, muzzled by what cannot be told, as the catastrophes move closer…”

Daria said, “I’m sorry. You’re right, and it makes me indignant to hear you. You talk like a symbolist poet:

“And there’s another poet, a Frenchman who betrayed every one of his promises, who wrote:

“He was onto something there. I wonder if literature notwithstanding, we don’t deserve to be ostracized or shot as much as anyone. Are you sure the Master doesn’t have good reason for the killing, some higher reason we don’t know of?”

He watched her twist her gloved fingers as though twisting her own arm. His answer was blunt.

“You’re ten years younger than I am, Dacha, and so the Master means more to you. We of the old guard, we were trained to depend upon ourselves, we had no use for masters, except those anointed by trust… But to the snot-nose brats of the next generation, intoxicated by the loudspeakers, no doubt he seemed a kind of god. Those youngsters will only sober up inside the grave he’s digging for them, or on the very edge of it, like us for that matter… I met him twenty years ago. There was no genius about him, there was no more to him than to any of us — something less, in fact. This deficiency served him well, as scruples and high-flown ideas can only interfere with the practice of tyranny, while a sense of the ridiculous might have prevented him from deifying himself. Remember how he rose to the top: it wasn’t particularly forceful or successful, and, above all, not even all that cunning. Historians fabricate greatness, as they call it, because they are mediocrities with lame imaginations who can only plod along the beaten track, and they’re cowed by the cudgel and their own mediocrity into shoring up the cult of established power… Power has the same hold over the tyrant as over anybody, because he has seized the levers of power just like a burglar making off with the Grand Seal of State. The burglar must lie low, the tyrant must defend himself even before he’s attacked, because he feels the reproof… Oh, the Master has his reasons all right — the worst!”

Behind Daria’s chilly hostility her panic was discernible, much like Nadine’s. (Women are more damaged than we are. This world is crueler to women…)

“How profoundly you’ve detached yourself,” she said slowly. “You speak like the enemy.”

“Whose enemy, Dacha? The enemy of all that we longed for, that we built, that we served? Of everything I still want? Of everything we were? Of the Party? But what has the Party turned into?

“The worst of reasons can never completely escape reason… I’ll suggest several. Treachery, ensconced somewhere among us at the top of the structure. You see, I’m quite capable of reasoning like him, because I share his concern. But I’ll discard that hypothesis as too far-fetched. What remains is a kind of madness of suspicion and fear, born of the sense of a crushing mission that is too heavy for those unexceptional shoulders… There is some of that within us too, a vast psychosis of the threat that has hung over us ever since we began to exist… A psychosis that battened on the stifling atmosphere of dictatorship… Salvation lay in opening the windows and letting in the air. Lastly, a reasonable reason, by which I mean an intelligible one, as in certain straightforward cases of insanity: war. This well-fed Europe, smugly wallowing in its pleasures, is so astoundingly mindless that the only people who have half a notion of what they are doing — and half is enough in the circumstances — are a handful of methodical lunatics like the addled visionary Hitler, or the fat beribboned Göring. And what they’re doing is driving their machinery over the brink. For me, the war never ended, I’m a soldier of the invisible war, the war of transition; I see the sappers’ tunnels ramifying with my own eyes, I see them packed with explosives while parliaments babble on above in blissful ignorance; give me my statistics sheets and a pencil and I’ll tell you how long we’ve got before the fireworks begin. Because mines are designed to blow up, and the fuses have been lit. There’s no other way out for this aberrant world. The Master knows it better than anyone. All the cards of the fiendish poker game are on the table, and they rear up, huge, in colors of fire, to taunt him in dreams every night. And he’s losing his head. We’ll be dragged into the war whatever we do, we’ll be stormed, grabbed by the throat, stabbed. So he wants to stand alone over the abyss; he can’t tolerate the presence of more talented rivals, because they too might lose their heads (less than him, mind you)… He doesn’t want to feel another precipice behind him, the little personal abyss into which he would assuredly be pushed by greater men… His true madness is to believe in his mission.”

Daria wondered: “Don’t you have the feeling of deserting?”

“Deserting what, the secret execution cellar? If I thought I had five chances in a hundred of surviving until the war, I’d swallow the disgust, the horror, the remorse, and I’d stay, I would! Can you honestly give me those five chances?”

“No.”

Her tension had subsided.

“What about me, Sacha, what do you think will happen to me?”

“Let me ponder that a moment. Would you like some port, a vermouth?”

They were two peaceful customers in a small brown café, a reconciled couple preparing to go home and resume everyday life. Madame Lambertier, who couldn’t abide histrionics, glanced over from behind the till and felt reassured. You see, when you truly care for each other all it takes sometimes is to have things out, candidly, in good faith… Madame Lambertier also maintained that a decent, well-kept establishment with a family atmosphere, so to speak, encourages marital reconciliation (at least at the times when ponces, tarts, cops, spivs, and other lowlifes who bring in the serious money are not around…). “Marie,” she hissed, “give them the good vermouth, for heaven’s sakes!” Meanwhile D was not pondering so much as letting the problem resolve itself in his mind.

“You’re compromised, Daria, by your long-standing relationship with me and a few others… But who isn’t, these days. Krantz more than you. Fifty-fifty, I’ll give you that much.”

“Then I’m staying. I wasn’t sure before, I was going to beg you to take me away no matter where. Because I also run out of strength sometimes. I cry, I smoke, I’ve tried to drink. I tried picking up a lover in a nightclub: it was gruesome enough to keep me chaste for a long time… I take tranquilizers and sleeping pills. I have this elderly doctor, a very good man for whom I’ve had to make up the most hair-raising love affairs, with constant twists worthy of a film… He must think I’m deranged. His advice is hopeless, but his pills do the trick. But you’ve steadied me. You’ve convinced me I must stay.”

D felt a pang of joy, as though this proved that he himself was no traitor… He listened to Daria’s affectionate voice “…and let’s keep a possibility of contact, I have no right to know where you’re going, but please make sure that if I feel frantic and lost, if I’m all alone in the world, I can come and find you both…”

“I will, Dacha.”

(It’s dangerous, but I will…)

They parted with a brief, friendly hug, in the midst of the racket made by an incoming brewer’s truck. The boulevard stretched before them, stark and bright under the milky sky.

On reaching the hotel desk, Monsieur Bruno Battisti felt a sickening jolt. There was a letter in the pigeonhole of room 17. IMPOSSIBLE since the addressee had no existence for anyone! A summons from the French Sûreté? A message from Krantz, meaning they’ve got me? Monsieur Battisti took the letter from Gobfin’s fingers, affected to barely glance at it, laid it on the desk, and said, with some exaggeration of his courteous manner so as to gain a little time with himself, “Please be so kind, Monsieur, as to prepare my bill, we’re leaving in an hour.”

At this, Monsieur Gobfin showed such surprise that he instantly appeared even sallower, knobbier, and more shifty-eyed than before.

“You don’t say, Monsieur Battisti!”

“I’ve just said so. We’re catching the fast train to Nice.”

“Ah, what a pity,” Monsieur Gobfin sighed, looking deeply put out. He half bowed, for a lady was coming down the stairs. Confidentially: “Could you not delay your departure — only till tomorrow morning, Monsieur Battisti?”

Monsieur Battisti, who would gladly have driven his heavy fist right between Quince-Face’s turbid eyes, merely muttered, “Whatever for?” in a low growling that said “bugger off.” Even more intimately now, Monsieur Gobfin filtered “serious accident” words through his clenched teeth: “The police were here…” There’s no mistaking that voice. Monsieur Battisti took it without blanching, taut as a bow already (and with the envelope of the IMPOSSIBLE letter under his palm). Play close to your chest — for what it’s worth!

“What of it?”

“You’ll miss the arrest.”

To double up with full-throated laughter, if that were allowed, what a relief! A madman! In this mad world, madmen pretend to be calm even at the reception desks of small hotels! So yesterday’s fat man really was there for me. The dame in the tit-crushing corset, whom he brought, was there for a sight of me. A brilliant piece of tailing, a prodigious feat! And now this crackpot lamenting my absence at the arrest — or pulling my leg! No future, a dark hole. Upstairs Nadine, suspecting nothing, poor Nadine… Now that the game was as good as up, Monsieur Battisti switched to puzzlement, so awkwardly that Gobfin, who had been scrutinizing his client’s tie, was taken aback.

“Arrest, what arrest?”

The burly ginger-haired Englishman from room 6, wearing a narrow-brimmed felt hat and a gray shiny overcoat — the kind popular with sailors on leave — was handing in his key.

“No letters?”

“No, sir. Will you take your evening meal in your room like yesterday, Monsieur Blackbridge?”

Monsieur Blackbridge’s gullet emitted a sound like chains screeching over a rusty pulley… A scene out of a third-rate melodrama with a noir ending, Blackbridge, Black Bridge, just the name to slug me from behind precisely in the next instant. The chain over the pulley — the chain, the cell — how easily we’re scuppered! Frau Lorelei Hexenkrantz, Madame Lorelei “the Witch” Krantz will step out of the lift… The world’s lunacy is artistically organized down to the smallest detail.

“No.” (The Englishman swallowed back a half laugh, like a chain rattling down a well.) “I’m going to Tabarin.”

“A wonderful show, Monsieur Blackbridge,” uttered Gobfin suavely.

The narrow-brimmed hat, the iron-gray overcoat were sucked out into the street. The witches carried off this ruddy man who imagined he was sauntering down rue de Rochechouart toward a sabbath of naked thighs… Battisti unclenched his jaws to repeat, as though landing a punch, “What arrest?”

And Monsieur Gobfin lit up, with a drowned man’s smile: “The Negro’s, of course!”

What Negro? Surely you’re not about to tell me I’m black? Anything is possible when madmen start to babble.

“It’ll be most discreetly done, in his room or in the corridor. We don’t expect any trouble. Two inspectors are already standing by in the dining room.”

Things slide mysteriously back into place; what was spinning out of control returns to equilibrium; you thought the plane was nose-diving right into the hard rim of the mountains, but the wings level off, the journey continues…

“Oh, quite right,” said Monsieur Battisti, “a great pity as you say. But time is money, my friend. Won’t this mean unwelcome publicity for the hotel?”

“Far from it!” Monsieur Gobfin said. “The crime was not committed on our premises, you understand.”

I’d like to know what crimes haven’t been committed here, you smarmy rat, was what Monsieur Battisti almost replied — but now the plane was diving down again toward a carpet of Paleozoic rocks: Monsieur Battisti picked up the IMPOSSIBLE letter. Curtly: “The bill, please, and fast. We’re off in half an hour.”

We’ll soon see whether that creep doesn’t grab the telephone! Battisti withdrew to the rattan sofa; Gobfin, on cue, unhooked the ear trumpet. Battisti kept an eye on him while dazedly reading the envelope again. Interior Ministry… No, what? Vatella and Misurini, Pasta Wholesalers… “Monsieur César Battistini…” Triple blockhead! Or is it a deliberate put-on, the better to gauge my reactions? Gobfin was talking through the receiver to a laundrywoman: “…and a mistake, Madame, in the linen count… We make it twenty pairs of double sheets, sixteen pairs of single sheets, forty-four pillowcases, six dozen napkins…” Monsieur Battisti’s ear listened for figures that might be a code… A news vendor pitched his falsetto into the lobby, “Speeee-cial edition! Ministerial criii-sis…” The Negro gentleman ambled in, stylish in his way, with the smooth suppleness of a dancer, the murderer nearing the scaffold, awaited on the first floor by two inspectors drinking red wine, what else. Monsieur Gobfin murmured, “Just a moment, don’t hang up…” and handed the Negro his room key, his key to the other world where you might arrive pulling a basket on a string containing your head which is no longer attached to your shoulders. “For pity’s sake, porter, put it back on now that I’ve paid for my sins.” You’d have to be a ventriloquist to say it, waving your distracted hands about… Gobfin was beaming with an air of pleased obsequiousness — at the counter of the imagined other world. “Thank you,” the Negro said without moving his lips, a ventriloquist already! Ready for his fate. Monsieur Battisti pushed his brief reverie aside.

“This letter, it’s not for me…” He couldn’t refrain from adding, absurdly, “It’s for the black man…”

“Really?” started Gobfin. “Did you see him? He’s done for now! But no, the letter’s not for him.”

An ingratiating, ghoulish grin split his face.

“Not for him nor for you either… My mistake, Monsieur Battistini, begging your pardon.”

“Ba-ttis-ti,” D stressed. “No ‘ni.’ Battistini chopped short.”

“Chopped short,” echoed Gobfin, coming down sharp with the side of his hand, and winking at the thought of the Negro.

In the marketplace of Samarkand, white-haired storytellers still chant the tales of the Thousand and One Nights as they jerk the strings of a puppet theater. Fingers move in the mystery box and out pops the Wicked Black Prince from the subterranean depths of Evil. Another movement, and the scimitar of Righteousness is brandished… The third plainclothes inspector appeared in just such a fashion. Monsieur Battisti immediately identified him by his boar-like neck and shriveled face. “Going up?” Gobfin inquired, with hidden passion. The shriveled face answered with a sinister “Not yet” as it turned to take in Monsieur Battisti. “The main thing is to get out of here,” thought D.

“Quick, Nadine! We’re off in ten minutes…” “This place is awful,” Nadine answered in a low voice. “But do we really have to leave?”

We are made in such a way that our fears subside and our obsessions vanish by virtue of a rhythm we don’t understand: often a change of scene is enough. The Battistis felt good in Le Havre. The air was salty and damp; light mists blew in from the Channel and floated over the avenues of the prosperous, peaceful city. The trees themselves, though bare of leaves, looked nourished by a richer sap, a healthier breeze, than those of Paris. The big cafés displayed a prosperous dignity. Bruno Battisti was unconcerned to find no reference to the Negro’s arrest in the papers. “They might very well keep it quiet for days,” he said to Noémi. (“Let’s get used to our new names.”) The green, foam-flecked, heavily churning sea instilled in them the carefree sense of having completed their escape, as though their connection to insoluble problems would be broken by crossing the ocean.

We live by memories accumulated within the unconscious, thought Bruno. We breathe more freely among mountains, because they arouse a quivering reminder of the primeval forest; caverns oppress us, echoing the age of fear and primitive magic — while oceans promise escape, adventure, discovery. For as long as humans have been persecuting and killing one another, hunted men have sought salvation on the seas, in such numbers that their flight must have contributed to the peopling of the earth; and it is surely fugitives, rather than conquerors, who led the way to new worlds… Even the legend of the Argonauts is that of Jason’s banishment and flight, the Golden Fleece perhaps no more than a symbol of escape. Modern man could usefully return to the study of ancient myths in the light of his recent experience… And what of our feeling that the sea is beautiful, when it is actually an inhuman, featureless mass of an enormity to appall the thinking insect standing on the beach? The expanse of it, the aimless movement, the elementary power… shattering concepts! And yet the promise of an imagined safety is stronger still.

Now that cablegrams, police descriptions, secret orders, lies can circle the globe in a matter of hours and there are no more islands to discover, no more hideaways in which to slip the net of the special services, the urban labyrinth is a safer bet than any distant archipelago; which means we are the dupes of a memory wired to our instincts, when we listen to the millenarian song that hums in our breast in communion with the ancestors, paddling out to sea in their canoes… The city is our admirable prison, outside which we now find it almost impossible to live. We long to escape it, just as we involuntarily wish — in horror — for the deaths of our nearest and dearest, no doubt because through their extinction we aspire to our own…

“Nadine-Noémi, I’ve worked out beautiful plans, like an engineer applying himself to a construction problem. We have very little money, and that merely by chance. They controlled us through that as well, it hadn’t occurred to me. (Disregard for money was one of our strengths and it’s turned against us.) “We still have our hands, and our heads, useless now… I’ve decided on definitive liberation, goodbye to Europe, Asia, cities, the coming war… Tolstoy was on the right track in some ways. How much earth does a man need? Enough to feed him and to bury him… We’ll have that much in a country that’s hot and violently alive. Because in losing everything, we should at least recover the primordial sensation of life.”

Noémi rejoined lightheartedly, “The great mystical count professed the philosophy of a petty vegetarian rentier. At least that’s what they taught me. Don’t sulk, my last-minute Tolstoyan, I love to hear you talk like that.”

It was their last morning in Europe. They spent it walking on a wet stony beach at the edge of the cold sea, making fun of the ugly villas that dotted the shoreline, houses as tawdry and pretentious as the stunted lives within. And oddly touching, all the same, for even this second-rate architecture had something to say about man’s resistance to the destruction of the best in him. An aspiration to adventure, to aesthetics, translated as plaster busts of Second Empire demimondaines protruding from the rocaille of gardens no bigger than the exercise yard of a prison cell; the love of light, of the purity of the heavenly spheres, was expressed in arrangements of tinted glass balls over fountains kept dry out of thrift. There were villas trying to look like Scottish castles, Bavarian chalets, Turkish pavilions, or Gothic piles; they looked like toys for overgrown children whose imaginations were waging a losing battle against extinction.

Beyond loomed the noble form, gray and tormented, of the cliffs. All the forms of the earth are great and noble. Have you noticed how no terrestrial thing is ridiculous? Ridicule and meanness appear in the works of men. They are defeats… We are all limited and ridiculous… Yellow grasses tousled the cliff top; below, birds nested in the holes and there was a great palaver of beating wings to deter nest-robbers. The toylike cannons of a fort poked over the summit; its blue-white-red flag waved innocently in the wind… The Battistis were forced to skirt a recent cave-in. As they contemplated this display of ruined might, they were accosted by a woman with a shopping basket on her arm, returning to some isolated cottage on the beach, curious about this pair of bad-weather walkers.

“It came crashing down a month ago,” she said. “Quite a fall!”

“No one killed, I hope?” Bruno asked out of politeness, naturally assuming that no one would be killed out in this lonely place.

“No, no! People only come here on Sundays, during the good weather. It was a weekday and out of season… Just a dog trainer who lived in a hut.”

“Of course,” said Nadine, as if in agreement. “That doesn’t count. Good day, Madame.”

They retraced their steps, feeling sobered and yet amused. A cliff battered by the tides cracks open, starts to shift, becomes treacherous moving earth of unstable times, begins to slide; a distant rumbling gathers force, a keening, a subterranean chant, a song! A hunk of chalk and clay, long accustomed to the blistering winds, breaks off and pitches forward slowly like an instantaneous murder. Insignificant catastrophes are prepared and consummated much like those of whole societies, heralded by a mounting murmur that can be heard, provided one has one’s ear to the ground rather than listening to jazz. “Nothing to worry about,” is the complacent response, “we’ve heard such noises before, the world is perfectly stable, the proof, look how healthy we are…”

“I can still hear that stupid lady saying ‘Oh no, no one was killed…’ ” began Noémi. “ ‘Nobody but a dog trainer.’ Think of him, patiently building his shack out of bits of wreckage, sleeping alone under the fissured cliff to the sound of the tides, waking up to this bleak landscape… I wonder what he trained his dogs to do? Fetch starfish? Beg on their hind legs for a lump of sugar? How many contingencies had to come together for him to die here with his dogs!”

She sized up the cliff face with a glance.

“Do you know, I wouldn’t mind living here myself. It looks solid enough. I’d happily run the risk… Then if one night we were buried under tons of rock, so what? It’d be natural. No one else, just us…”

Bruno said, “Soon they’ll be writing, ‘just’ a town, ‘just’ an army, ‘just’ a people, ‘just’ a country… A little country under a collapsing cliff… In a time of wholesale collapse. Professionally trained military staffs are this minute working out the figures for the whole of Europe, in accordance with various scenarios. The first year of the war will cost X million young lives, resulting in an X percent fall in the birthrate and having X impact upon production. Not unlike planning for the annihilation of, say, Belgium — machines, bodies, and souls under a toppling Himalaya… It’s only a matter of time. Our calculations are as precise about the initial time frame as in predicting an eclipse… The latest possible date is already settled, though events may well jump the gun. The madman-god of history is in a hurry…”

A nippy salt-sea wind had risen against them. Noémi turned around, the better to be enfolded by it. She saw Bruno trudging toward her, hunched, bareheaded, his hands stuffed into his pockets. His determined tread over the slippery stones, his wrinkled brow, the bitter set of his mouth, made her shout, “What did you say? I could hardly hear… the wind… Sacha…”

“Nothing… nothing.”

With all his strength, he wanted to shout, “Nothing… I announce Nothing! Cruelty, destruction, madness, nothingness… Nothing!” For this long-ripened vision burst within him with the impersonal clarity of a mathematical formula explaining the past, the murders, the future. “I have to stay… To defend… What? You’d defend nothing, you’d disappear before you could move. Nothing is possible… The magic word, the keyword of our time: Nothing.

“If only I could be one of those industrious ants who will soon be trying absurdly to rescue a child, an injured man, a tool, a book from the rubble of some flattened city… One of the infinitesimal brains working underground in enemy strongholds, tirelessly sapping the bureaus of the planners of destruction… The final justification of life: to destroy the destroyers without knowing whether one is not, in reality, finishing the job for them.”

He cried out into the wind, with a bitter joy, “Nadine-Noémi, I’ve found the formula…” (A gulp of salt air made him cough and spit, touched by the thought of poison gas attacks.) “Here’s the formula: the destroyers… will be destroyed… destroyed!”

The wind suddenly dropped. Noémi let him catch up, and he put his arms around her.

“What were you shouting, Sacha? You looked half insane. It suited you, actually.”

“Nothing.” (Is that word to come up again and again of its own accord, is it my answer to everything?) “I was thinking we should stay, whatever happens. I’m fond of this world, and we should stand up for it. I’m ashamed to be running away…”

“Stay, where, old friend? Doing what? You know what would happen… It hurts me as much as you.”

Disheveled, he shook his head, losing his excited grip on the vision, annoyed to be showing his weakness.

“Don’t worry, we’ll be boarding ship in a little while. I’m tense and I’m depressed, that’s all. I need rest. It’s nothing.”

Nothing. Another discovery of lucidity. If you were fully conscious of it, could you go on living? You always return, without knowing how, to your own reasonable normality. That’s better.

They boarded the liner quietly in the afternoon. Unimpeachable passports, the real thing at last, and the right nationality — Blackshirt Italy inspires such confidence, not like the travel passes of stateless aliens or Spanish Republicans! There were no obviously suspicious characters among the groups lining the quay (or there were nothing but). D felt almost disappointed at things proceeding so smoothly. They took possession of their cabin which was decorated in two colors, cream and blue. D asked the purser about their neighbors and any notables among the passengers: there was Herr Schwalbe, the diamond magnate, and his lady wife; Pastor and Mrs. Hooghe and their small son; Monsieur Gilles Gurie, French vice-consul at… ; Miss Gloria Pearling, the dancer, and her secretary. “Excellent,” said Mr. Battisti, “I see we shall be traveling in good company…” “Most emphatically, Monsieur. We also have Crown Prince Ouad and his court, and the American philanthropist, Mrs. Calvin H. W. Flatt…”

“Oh là là!” commented D, in a vulgar voice that contrasted with his manner and diction.

The purser disappeared down a staircase leading to the bowels of the ship. So one is saving his diamonds in time; another has religiously wound up his European tour with its museum visits, evangelical dinners, and surreptitious, burning glances at the perdition of Paris; the third is off to his pleasant sinecure overseas, congratulating himself on dodging the prospective mobilization, at least for the moment; while the platinum-haired dancer drawls to her copper-haired secretary — chosen for contrast. “Alone at last, darling!” crude as the hand she claps on a dusky breast. And who’s this prince? An Egyptian? An Iraqi? Awash in dollars stained by the sweat of Bedouins and fellahin? Does he go around in a burnoose, for photogenic effect, or as an habitué of Monte Carlo? Is he interested in oil? Will he seduce the philanthropist from Chicago or be seduced by the dancer? Our purser seems to have taken his cast from a penny novelette. So it goes. To each his checkbook, and may the world go to hell! The joke is that in all probability these are people — possibly excepting the prince — who are innocent of the least villainy and who would be amazed to learn that they have no more notion of what’s happening in the world than do moths crackling blindly into lanterns in a garden… At the end of a chic garden party, of course. The only counterfeit in this company is myself, for I am fully authentic. The only one who knows what he is running from, and wishes he were not fleeing… Or else I have too much trite imagination.

“Wait here for me,” Bruno said to Noémi. He prowled the ship, scrutinizing forms and faces, and returned from his inspection content — which proved nothing. Nothing at all.

The last scattered points of light on the coast of Europe disappeared over the horizon. The ship’s hull was plowing through a resisting mineral sea at the end of which, perhaps, lay nothing.