Читать книгу The Mandarins - Simone Beauvoir de - Страница 8

No, I shan’t meet death today. Not today or any other day. I’ll be dead for others and yet I’ll never have known death.

I closed my eyes again, but I couldn’t sleep. Why had death entered my dreams once more? It is prowling inside me; I can feel it prowling there. Why?

I hadn’t always been aware that one day I would die. As a child, I believed in God. A white robe and two shimmering wings were awaiting me in heaven’s vestry and I wanted so much to break through the clouds and try them on. I would often lie down on my quilt, my hands clasped, and abandon myself to the delights of the hereafter. Sometimes in my sleep I would say to myself, ‘I’m dead,’ and the voice watching over me guaranteed me eternity. I was horrified when I first discovered the silence of death. A mermaid had died on a deserted beach. She had renounced her immortal soul for the love of a young man and all that remained of her was a bit of white foam without memory and without voice. ‘It’s only a fairy tale,’ I would say to myself for reassurance.

But it wasn’t a fairy tale. I was the mermaid. God became an abstract idea in the depths of the sky, and one evening I blotted it out altogether. I’ve never felt sorry about losing God, for He had robbed me of the earth. But one day I came to realize that in renouncing Him I had condemned myself to death. I was fifteen, and I cried out in fear in the empty house. When I regained my senses, I asked myself, ‘What do other people do? What will I do? Will I always live with this fear inside me?’

From the moment I fell in love with Robert, I never again felt fear, of anything. I had only to speak his name and I would feel safe and secure: he’s working in the next room … I can get up and open the door … But I remain in bed; I’m not sure any more that he too doesn’t hear that little, gnawing sound. The earth splits open under our feet, and above our heads there is an infinite abyss. I no longer know who we are, nor what awaits us.

Suddenly, I sat bolt upright, opened my eyes. How could I possibly admit to myself that Robert was in danger? How could I ever bear it? He hadn’t told me anything really disturbing, nothing really new. I’m tired, I drank too much; just a little four-o’clock-in-the-morning frenzy. But who’s to decide at what hour one sees things clearest? Wasn’t it precisely when I believed myself most secure that I used to awaken in frenzies? And did I ever really believe it?

I can’t quite remember. We didn’t pay very much attention to ourselves, Robert and I. Only events counted: the flight from Paris, the return, the sirens, the bombs, the standing in lines, our reunions, the first issues of L’Espoir. A brown candle was sputtering in Paula’s apartment. With a couple of tin cans, we had built a stove in which we used to burn scraps of paper. The smoke would sting our eyes. Outside, puddles of blood, the whistling of bullets, the rumbling of artillery and tanks. In all of us, the same silence, the same hunger, the same hope. Every morning we would awaken asking ourselves the same question: Is the swastika still flying above the Senate? And in August, when we danced around blazing bonfires in the streets of Montparnasse, the same joy was in all our hearts. Then the autumn slipped by, and only a few hours ago, while we were completing the task of forgetting our dead by the lights of a Christmas tree, I realized that we were beginning to exist again each for himself. ‘Do you think it’s possible to bring back the past?’ Paula had asked. And Henri had said, ‘I feel like writing a light novel.’ They could once again speak in their normal voices, have their books published; they could argue again, organize political groups, make plans. That’s why they were all so happy. Well, almost all. Anyhow, this isn’t the time for me to be tormenting myself. Tonight’s a holiday, the first Christmas of peace, the last Christmas at Buchenwald, the last Christmas on earth, the first Christmas Diego hasn’t lived through. We were dancing, we were kissing each other around the tree sparkling with promises, and there were many, oh, so many, who weren’t there. No one had heard their last words; they were buried nowhere, swallowed up in emptiness. Two days after the liberation, Geneviève had placed her hand on a coffin. Was it the right one? Jacques’s body had never been found; a friend claimed he had buried his notebooks under a tree. What notebooks? Which tree? Sonia had asked for a sweater and silk stockings, and then she never again asked for anything. Where were Rachel’s bones and the lovely Rosa’s? In the arms that had so often clasped Rosa’s soft body, Lambert was now holding Nadine and Nadine was laughing the way she used to laugh when Diego held her in his arms. I looked down the row of Christmas trees reflected in the large mirrors and I thought, ‘There are the candles and the holly and the mistletoe they’ll never see. Everything that’s been given me, I stole from them,’ They were killed. Which one first? He or his father? Death didn’t enter into his plans. Did he know he was going to die? Did he rebel at the end or was he resigned to it? How will I ever know? And now that he’s dead, what difference does it make?

No, tombstone, no date of death. That’s why I’ve been groping for him through that life he loved so tumultuously. I hold out my hand towards the light switch and hesitantly withdraw it. In my desk is a picture of Diego, but even though I looked at it for hours I would never find again under that head of bushy hair, his real face of flesh and bones, that face in which everything was too large – his eyes, nose, ears, mouth. He was sitting in the study and Robert had asked, ‘What will you do if the Nazis win?’ And he had answered, ‘A Nazi victory doesn’t enter into my plans.’ His plans consisted of marrying Nadine and becoming a great poet. And he might have made it, too. At sixteen he already knew how to turn words into hot, glowing embers. He might have needed only a very little time – five years, four years; he lived his life so fast. Huddled with the others around the electric heater, I used to enjoy watching him devour Hegel or Kant; he would turn the pages as rapidly as if he were skimming through a murder mystery. And the fact of the matter is that he understood perfectly everything he read. Only his dreams were slow.

He had come one day to show Robert his poems, which was how we first got to know him. His father was a Spanish Jew who was stubbornly determined to continue making money in business even during the Occupation. He claimed the Spanish consul was protecting him. Diego reproached him for his luxurious style of living and his opulent blonde mistress; he preferred our austerity and spent almost all his time with us. Besides, he was at the hero-worshipping age; and he worshipped Robert. The moment he met Nadine, he impetuously gave her his love, his first, his only love. For the first time she had a feeling of being needed; it overwhelmed her. She immediately made room in the house for Diego and invited him to live with us. He had a great deal of affection for me as well, even though he found me much too rational. At night, Nadine insisted upon my tucking her in, the way I used to when she was a child. Lying next to her, he would ask me, ‘And me? Don’t I get a kiss?’ And I would kiss him. That year, we had been friends, my daughter and I. I was grateful to her for being capable of a sincere love and she was thankful to me for not opposing her deepest desire. Why should I have? She was only seventeen, but both Robert and I felt that it’s never too early to be happy.

And they knew how to be happy with so much fire! When we were together, I would rediscover my youth. ‘Come and have dinner with us. Come on, tonight’s a holiday,’ they would say, each one pulling me by an arm. Diego had filched a gold piece from his father. He preferred to take rather than to receive; it was the way of his generation. He had no trouble in changing his treasure into negotiable money and he spent the afternoon with Nadine on the roller coaster at an amusement park. When I met them on the street that evening, they were devouring a huge pie they had bought in the back room of a nearby bakery; it was their way of working up an appetite. They called up Robert and asked him to come along too, but he refused to leave his work. I went with them. Their faces were smeared with jam, their hands black with the grime of the fairground, and in their eyes was the arrogant look of happy criminals. The maître d’hôtel must have surely believed we had come there with the intention of squandering some ill-gotten gains. He showed us to a table far in the rear of the room and asked Diego with chilly politeness, ‘Monsieur has no jacket?’ Nadine threw her jacket over Diego’s threadbare sweater, revealing her own soiled, wrinkled blouse. But in spite of it all, we were served. They ordered ice cream first, and sardines, and then steaks, fried potatoes, oysters, and still more ice cream. ‘It all gets mixed up inside anyhow,’ they explained to me, stuffing the food into their mouths. They were so happy to be able for once to eat their fill! No matter how hard I tried to get enough food to go around, we were always more or less hungry. ‘Eat up,’ they said to me commandingly, as they slipped slices of pâté into their pockets for Robert.

It wasn’t long after this that the Germans one morning knocked at Mr Serra’s door. No one had informed him that the Spanish consul had been transferred. Diego, as luck would have it, had slept at his father’s that night. They didn’t take the blonde. ‘Tell Nadine not to worry about me,’ Diego said. ‘I’ll come back, because I want to come back.’ Those were the last words we ever heard from him; all his other words were drowned out forever, he who loved so much to talk.

It was springtime and the sky was very blue, the peach trees a pastel pink. When we would ride our bicycles, Nadine and I, through the flag-decked parks of Paris, the fragrant joy of peacetime weekends filled our lungs. But the tall buildings of Drancy, where the prisoners were kept, brutally crushed that lie. The blonde had handed over three million francs to a German named Felix who transmitted messages from the prisoners and who had promised to help them escape. Twice, peering through binoculars, we were able to pick out Diego standing at a distant window. They had shaved off his woolly hair and it was no longer entirely he who smiled back at us; his mutilated head seemed even then to belong to another world.

One afternoon in May we found the huge barracks deserted; straw mattresses were being aired at the open windows of empty rooms. At the café where we had parked our bicycles, they told us that three trains had left the station during the night. Standing by the barbed-wire fence, we watched and waited for a long time. And then suddenly, very far off, very high up, we made out two solitary silhouettes leaning out of a window. The younger one waved his beret triumphantly. Felix had spoken the truth: Diego had not been deported. Choked with joy, we rode back to Paris.

‘They’re in a camp with American prisoners,’ the blonde told us. ‘They’re doing fine, taking lots of sun baths.’ But she hadn’t actually seen them. We sent them sweaters and chocolate, and they thanked us for the gifts through the mouth of Felix. But we stopped receiving written messages. Nadine insisted upon some sort of sign to prove they were still alive – Diego’s ring, a lock of his hair. But it was just then that they changed camps again, were sent somewhere far from Paris. It became increasingly difficult to locate them in any particular place; they were gone, that was all. To be nowhere or not to be at all isn’t very different. Nothing really changed when at last Felix said irritably, ‘They killed them a long time ago.’

Nadine wept frantically night after night, and I held her in my arms from evening till morning. Then she found sleep once more. At first Diego appeared every night in her dreams, a wretched look on his face. Later even his spectre vanished. She was right; I can’t really blame her. What can you do with a corpse? Yes, I know. They serve as excuses for making flags, heroic statues, guns, medals, speeches, and even souvenirs for decorating the home. It would be far better to leave their ashes in peace. Monuments or dust. And they had been our brothers. But after all, we had no choice in the matter. Why did they leave us? If only they would leave us in peace! Let’s forget them, I say. Let’s think a little about ourselves now. We’ve more than enough to do remaking our own lives. The dead are dead; for them there are no more problems. But after this night of festivity, we, the living, will awaken again. And then how shall we live?

Nadine and Lambert were laughing together, a record was playing loudly, the floor was trembling under our feet, the blue flames of the candles were flickering. I looked at Sézenac who was lying on the rug, thinking no doubt of those glorious days when he strutted down the boulevards of Paris with a rifle slung over his shoulder. I looked at Chancel who had been condemned to death by the Germans and at the last moment exchanged for one of their prisoners. And Lambert whose father had denounced his fiancée, and Vincent who had killed a dozen of our home-grown Nazi militiamen with his own hands. What will they all do with those pasts of theirs, so grievous and so brief? And what will they do with their shapeless futures? Will I know how to help them? Helping people is my job; I make them lie down on a couch and pour out their dreams to me. But I can’t bring Rosa back to life, nor the twelve Nazis Vincent killed. And even if I were somehow able to neutralize their pasts, what kind of future could I offer them? I quiet fears, harness dreams, restrain desires; I make them adjust themselves. But to what? I can no longer see anything around me that makes sense.

No question about it, I had too much to drink. After all, it wasn’t I who created heaven and earth; no one’s asking me to give an accounting of myself. Why must I forever be worrying about others? I’d do better to worry a little about myself for a change. I press my cheek against the pillow; I’m here, it’s I. The trouble is there’s nothing about me worth giving much thought to. Oh, if someone asks who I am, I can always show him my case history; to become an analyst, I had to be analysed. It was found that I had a rather pronounced Oedipus complex, which explains my marriage to a man twenty years my elder, a clear aggressiveness towards my mother, and some slight homosexual tendencies which conveniently disappeared. To my Catholic upbringing I owe a highly developed super ego – the reason for my puritanism and my lack of narcissism. The ambivalent feelings I have in regard to my daughter stem from my aversion to my mother as much as to my indifference concerning myself. My case is one of the most classic types; its segments fall neatly into a predictable pattern. From a Catholic point of view, it’s also quite banal: in their eyes I stopped believing in God when I discovered the temptations of the flesh, and my marriage to an unbeliever completed my downfall. Politically and socially Robert and I were left-wing intellectuals. Nothing in all this is entirely inexact. There I am then, clearly catalogued and willing to be so, adjusted to my husband, to my profession, to life, to death, to the world and all its horrors; me, precisely me, that is to say, no one.

To be no one, all things considered, is something of a privilege. I watched them coming and going in the room, all of them with their important names, and I didn’t envy them. For Robert it was all right; he was predestined to be what he was. But the others, how do they dare? How can anyone be so arrogant or so rash as to serve himself up as prey to a pack of strangers? Their names are dirtied in thousands of mouths; the curious rob them of their thoughts, their hearts, their lives. If I too were subjected to the cupidity of that ferocious mob of ragpickers, I would certainly end up by considering myself nothing but a pile of garbage. I congratulated myself for not being someone.

I went over to Paula. The war had not affected her aggressive elegance. She was wearing a long, silk, violet-coloured gown, and from her ears hung clusters of amethysts.

‘You’re very lovely tonight,’ I said.

She looked at herself quickly in one of the large mirrors. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said sadly. ‘I’m lovely.’

She was indeed beautiful, but under her eyes there were deep circles that matched the colour of her dress. At heart she knew very well that Henri could have taken her to Portugal. She knew much more than she pretended to know.

‘You must be very happy; your party’s a great success.’

‘Henri loves parties so much,’ Paula said, her hands, heavy with rings, mechanically smoothing her shimmering silk dress.

‘Won’t you sing something for us? I’d so much like to hear you sing again.’

‘Sing?’ she said, surprised.

‘Yes, sing,’ I replied laughingly. ‘Have you forgotten that you used to sing once upon a time?’

‘Once – but that was long ago,’ she answered.

‘Not any more it isn’t. Now it’s like old times again.’

‘Do you really think so?’ Paula asked, staring intently into my eyes. She seemed to be peering into a crystal ball somewhere beyond my face. ‘Do you think it’s possible to bring back the past?’

I knew how she wanted me to answer that question, but with a slightly embarrassed laugh I said only, ‘I don’t know; I’m not an oracle.’

‘I must get Robert to explain the meaning of time to me,’ she said meditatively.

She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal. I was afraid for her. She had been well aware during these past four years that Henri no longer felt anything more than a wearied affection for her. But ever since the liberation, I don’t know what insane hope had awakened in her heart.

‘Do you remember the Negro spiritual I used to like so much? Won’t you sing it for us?’

She walked over to the piano and lifted the keyboard cover. Her voice seemed slightly hollow, but it was just as moving as ever. ‘You know, she ought to appear in public again,’ I said to Henri, who greeted my words with a look of astonishment. When the applause died down, he went over to Nadine and began dancing with her. I didn’t like the way she was looking at him. There was nothing I could do to help her, either. I had given her my only decent dress and lent her my prettiest necklace; that was all I had the power to do. I knew it would be useless to probe her dreams; all she needed was the love Lambert was so anxious to give her. But how could I prevent her from destroying it, as I knew she ultimately would? And yet when Lambert entered the room, she raced down the little stairway from the top of which she had been surveying us with a look of disapproval. She stopped dead on the last step, embarrassed by her too-open display of affection.

Lambert walked over to her and smiled gravely. ‘I’m glad you came,’ he said.

‘The only reason I came was to see you,’ she said brusquely.

He looked handsome this evening in his dark, well-cut suit. He always dresses with the studied severity of a person much older than himself; he has ceremonious ways, a sober voice, and he exercises a very careful control over his smiles. But his confused look and the softness of his mouth betray his youthfulness. Nadine, obviously, is at once flattered by his seriousness and reassured by his weakness.

‘Did you have a good time?’ she asked, looking at him with an affable, somewhat silly expression. ‘I hear that Alsace is very beautiful.’

‘Once a place is militarized, you know, it becomes utterly dismal.’

They sat down on one of the steps of the stairway, chatted, danced, and laughed together for quite a long while. And then they began to argue. With Nadine it always ended like that. Lambert, a sullen look on his face, was now sitting next to the heater, and Nadine was standing by the stairway. Bringing them together from opposite ends of the room and joining their hands was completely out of the question.

I walked over to the buffet and poured myself a brandy. My eyes glanced down along my black skirt and stopped at my legs. It was funny to think I had legs; no one ever noticed them, not even myself. They were slender and well-shaped in their beige stockings, certainly no less well-shaped than many another pair. And yet one day they’d be buried in the earth without ever having existed. It seemed unfair. I was still absorbed in contemplating them when Scriassine came over to me.

‘You don’t seem to be having a very good time,’ he said.

‘Well, I’m doing the best I can.’

‘Too many young people here. Young people are never gay. And far too many writers.’ He pointed his chin towards Lenoir, Pelletier, and Cange. ‘They’re all writers, aren’t they?’

‘Every one of them.’

‘And you, do you write, too?’

‘God, no!’ I said, laughing.

I liked his brusque manner. Like everyone else, I had read his famous book, The Red Paradise. But I had been especially moved by his book on Austria under the Nazis. It was something much more than a mere journalistic account; it was an impassioned testimony. He had fled Austria after having fled Russia and finally became a naturalized French citizen. But he had spent the last four years in America and we had met him for the first time only this autumn. Almost immediately he began calling Robert and Henri by their first names, but he never seemed to notice that I existed.

‘I wonder what’s going to become of them,’ he said, turning his eyes from me.

‘Who?’

‘The French in general and these people here in particular.’

I studied his triangular face with its prominent cheekbones, its hard, fiery eyes, its thin, almost feminine mouth. It wasn’t at all the face of a Frenchman. To him Russia was an enemy nation, and he did not have any great love for the United States. There wasn’t a place on earth where he really felt at home.

‘I returned from New York on an English boat,’ he said with a slight smile. ‘One day the steward said to me, “The poor French! They don’t know if they won the war or lost it.” It seems to me that that sums up the situation rather well.’

There was an irritating complacency in his voice. ‘I don’t think it matters much what kind of tag you put on things that happened in the past,’ I said. ‘What does matter is the future.’

‘That’s just it,’ he said spiritedly. ‘To make something good of the future, you have to look the present in the face. And I get the distinct impression that these people here aren’t doing that at all. Dubreuilh talks to me of a literary review, Perron of a pleasure trip. They all seem to feel they’ll be able to go on living just like before the war.’

‘And of course, you were sent from heaven to open their eyes,’ I said dryly.

Scriassine smiled. ‘Do you know how to play chess?’

‘Very poorly.’

He continued to smile and all trace of pedantry vanished from his face – we were intimate friends, accomplices, had known each other since childhood. ‘He’s working his Slavic charm on me,’ I thought. And as a matter of fact, the charm worked; I smiled back at him.

‘When I’m just watching chess, I can spot good moves more clearly than the players themselves, even if I’m not as good at the game as they are. Well, that’s the way it is here; I’m an outsider, an onlooker, so I can pretty well see what’s in store for you people.’

‘What?’

‘An impasse.’

‘An impasse? What do you mean by that?’

Suddenly, I found myself anxiously awaiting his reply. We had all been living together in such a tightly sealed circle for so long a time, with no intrusions by outsiders, any witnesses, that this man from without troubled me.

‘French intellectuals are facing an impasse. It’s their turn now,’ he added with a kind of satisfaction. ‘Their art, their philosophies can continue to have meaning only within the framework of a certain kind of civilization. And if they want to save that civilization, they’ll have no time or energy left over to give to art or philosophy.’

‘This isn’t the first time Robert’s been active in politics,’ I said. ‘And it never before stopped him from writing.’

‘Yes, in ’34 Dubreuilh gave a great deal of his time to the struggle against fascism,’ Scriassine said in his suave voice. ‘But to him, that struggle seemed morally reconcilable with literary preoccupations.’ With a slight trace of anger, he added, ‘In France, the pressure of history has never been felt in all its urgency. But in Russia, in Austria, in Germany, it was impossible to escape it. That’s why I, for example, was never able to write.’

‘But you have written.’

‘Don’t you think I dreamed of writing other kinds of books, too? But it was out of the question.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘To be able to continue taking an interest in things cultural in the face of Stalin and Hitler, you have to have one hell of a humanistic tradition behind you. But, of course,’ he went on, ‘in the country of Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jaurès, it’s easy to believe that culture and politics go hand in hand. Paris has thought of itself as Athens. But Athens no longer exists; it’s dead.’

‘As far as feeling the pressure of history is concerned,’ I said, ‘I think Robert could give you a few pointers.’

‘I’m not attacking your husband,’ Scriassine said, with a little smile that reduced my heated words to nothing more than an expression of conjugal loyalty. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he continued, ‘I consider Robert Dubreuilh and Thomas Mann to be the two greatest minds of this age. But that’s precisely it; if I predict that he’ll give up literature, it’s only because I have confidence in his lucidity.’

I shrugged my shoulders. If he was trying to soften me up, he was certainly going about it the wrong way. I detest Thomas Mann.

‘Robert will never give up writing,’ I said.

‘The remarkable thing in all of Dubreuilh’s works,’ said Scriassine, ‘is that he was able to reconcile high aesthetic standards with revolutionary inspiration. And in his own life, he attained an analogous equilibrium: he was organizing vigilance committees at the same time he was writing novels. But it’s precisely that beautiful equilibrium that’s now becoming impossible.’

‘You can count on Robert to devise some new kind of equilibrium,’ I said.

‘He’s bound to sacrifice his aesthetic standards,’ Scriassine said. Suddenly his face lit up and he asked in a triumphant voice, ‘Do you know anything about prehistoric times?’

‘Not much more than I do about chess.’

‘But perhaps you know this: that for a vast period of time the wall paintings and objects found in caves and excavations bear witness to a continuous artistic progress. Abruptly, both drawings and sculptures disappear; there’s an eclipse lasting several centuries which coincides with the development of new techniques. Well, just now we’re at the edge of a new era in which, for different reasons, humanity will have to grapple with all sorts of difficult problems, leaving us no time for the luxury of expressing ourselves artistically.’

‘Reasoning by analogy doesn’t prove very much,’ I said.

‘All right then, let’s forget that comparison,’ Scriassine said patiently. ‘You’ve probably been too close to this war we’ve gone through to properly understand it. Actually, it was something entirely different from a war – the liquidation of a society, and even of a world, or rather the beginning of their liquidation. The progress that science and engineering have made, the economic changes that have come about, will convulse the earth to such an extent that even our ways of thinking and feeling will be revolutionized. We’ll even have difficulty remembering just who and what we had once been. And among other things art and literature will become nothing more than peripheral divertissements.’

I shook my head and Scriassine resumed heatedly: ‘Don’t you see? What weight will the message of French writers have when the earth is ruled by either Russia or the United States? No one will understand them any more; very few will even speak their language.’

‘From the way you talk, it would seem you’re rather enjoying the prospect,’ I said.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Now isn’t it just like a woman to say a thing like that! They’re simply incapable of being objective.’

‘Well, let’s be objective then,’ I said. ‘Objectively, it’s never been proved that the world must become either American or Russian.’

‘In the long run, give or take a few years, it’s bound to happen.’ With a gesture of his hand, he stopped me from interrupting him and then gave me one of his charming Slavic smiles. ‘I think I understand you. The liberation is still fresh in your mind. All of you are wading shoulder deep in euphoria. For four years you suffered a great deal and now you think you’ve paid enough. Well, you never can pay enough,’ he said with a sudden harshness. He looked me squarely in the eyes. ‘Do you know there’s a very powerful faction in Washington that would like to see the German campaign continued right up to Moscow? And from their point of view they’re right. American imperialism, like Russian totalitarianism, requires unlimited expansion. In the end, one or the other has to win.’ A note of sadness entered his voice. ‘You think you’re celebrating the German defeat, but what you’re actually witnessing is the beginning of World War Three.’

‘Those are your prognostications,’ I said.

‘I know Dubreuilh believes in peace and in the possibility of maintaining a free and independent Europe,’ Scriassine said. ‘But even brilliant minds can sometimes be mistaken,’ he added with an indulgent smile. ‘We’ll be annexed by Russia or colonized by America, of that you can be sure.’

‘Well, if that’s the case, then there’s no impasse,’ I said gaily. ‘If it’s inevitable, what’s the sense of worrying about it? Those who enjoy writing will just go right on writing.’

‘What an idiotic game that would be! To write when there’s no one to read what you’ve written.’

‘When everything has gone to hell, there’s nothing to do but to play idiotic games.’

Scriassine remained silent for a moment and then a half-smile crossed his face. ‘Nevertheless, certain conditions would be less unfavourable than others,’ he said confidently. ‘If Russia wins, there’s no problem: it’s the end of civilization and the end of all of us. But if America should win, the disaster wouldn’t be quite so bad. If we were able to give her certain values while maintaining some of our own ideas, there’d be some hope that future generations would one day re-establish the ties with our own culture and traditions. But to succeed in that would require the total mobilization of all our potential.’

‘Don’t tell me that in case of a war you’d hope for an American victory!’ I said.

‘No matter what happens, history must inevitably lead to a classless society,’ Scriassine said in reply. ‘It’s a matter of two or three centuries. But for the happiness of those men who’ll be living during the interval, I ardently hope that the revolution takes place in a world dominated by America and not by Russia.’

‘In a world dominated by America,’ I said, ‘I have a sneaking suspicion that the revolution will cool its heels a good long time.’

‘And you think that it should be a Stalinist revolution? The idea of revolution had quite an appeal in France, around 1930. But let me tell you, in Russia it wasn’t quite so appealing.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re preparing a big surprise for yourselves! The day the Russians occupy France you’ll begin to realize what I mean. Unfortunately, it’ll be too late then.’

‘You yourself don’t believe in a Russian occupation,’ I said.

Scriassine sighed. ‘So be it,’ he said. ‘Let’s be optimists. Let’s admit that Europe has a chance of remaining independent. But we can’t keep her that way except by waging a constant, interminable battle. Working for oneself will be entirely out of the question.’

I did not attempt to answer him. All that Scriassine wanted was to reduce French writers to silence, and I clearly understood why. There was nothing really convincing in his prophecies, and yet his tragic voice awakened an echo in me. ‘How shall we live?’ The question had been painfully pricking me all evening and for God knows how many days and weeks.

Scriassine looked at me intently. ‘One of two things can happen. If men like Dubreuilh and Perron look the situation square in the face, they’ll become involved in things that will demand all their time, all their energies. Or if they cheat and obstinately continue to write, their works will be cut off from reality, and deprived of any future; they’ll be like the words of blind people, as distressing as Alexandrine poetry.’

It’s difficult to engage in a discussion with someone who, while talking of the world and of others, talks constantly of himself. I was unable to speak my mind without hurting him. Nevertheless I said, ‘It’s useless trying to imprison people in dilemmas; life always causes them to break out.’

‘Not in this case. Alexandria or Sparta, there’s no other choice. It’s far better to admit a thing like that today than to put it off,’ he said rather gently. ‘Sacrifices are no longer painful when they’re behind you.’

‘I’m sure Robert won’t sacrifice anything.’

‘We’ll talk about it again a year from now,’ Scriassine said. ‘A year from now he’ll either have deserted politics or he’ll have stopped writing. I don’t think he’ll desert.’

‘And he won’t stop writing either.’

Scriassine’s face grew animated. ‘What would you like to bet? A bottle of champagne?’

‘I’m not betting anything at all.’

He smiled. ‘You’re the same as all women; you need fixed stars in the heavens and milestones on the highways.’

‘You know,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders, ‘those fixed stars did quite a lot of dancing around during the last four years.’

‘Yes, and nevertheless you’re still convinced that France will always be France, and Robert Dubreuilh, Robert Dubreuilh. If not, you’d be lost.’

‘Listen,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Your objectivity begins to seem rather doubtful.’

‘I’m forced to follow you on your grounds; you oppose me with nothing but subjective convictions,’ Scriassine said. A smile warmed his inquisitive eyes. ‘You take things very seriously, don’t you?’

‘That depends.’

‘I was warned about that,’ he said. ‘But I like serious women.’

‘Who warned you?’

With a vague gesture, he indicated every one and no one. ‘People.’

‘What did they tell you?’

‘That you were distant and austere. But I don’t really think so.’

I pressed my lips together, hoping it would prevent me from asking further questions. I’ve always been able to avoid being caught by the snare of mirrors. But the glances, the looks, the stares of other people, who can resist that dizzying pit? I dress in black, speak little, write not at all; together, all these things form a certain picture which others see. I’m no one. It’s easy of course to say ‘I am I.’ But who am I? Where find myself? I would have to be on the other side of every door, but when it’s I who knock the others grow silent. Suddenly I felt my face burning; I felt like ripping it off.

‘Why don’t you write?’ Scriassine asked.

‘There are enough books in the world.’

‘That’s not the only reason,’ he said, staring at me through small, prying eyes. ‘The truth is you don’t want to expose yourself.’

‘Expose myself to what?’

‘On the surface, you seem very sure of yourself, but basically you’re extremely timid. You’re one of those people who pride themselves on not doing things.’

I interrupted him. ‘Don’t try analysing me; I know every dark recess of myself. I’m a psychiatrist, you know.’

‘I know,’ he said smiling. ‘Do you think we could have dinner together one evening? I feel lost in this blacked out Paris; I don’t seem to know anyone any more.’

Suddenly, I thought, ‘Well, well! At least for him I have legs!’ I took out my note-book; I had no reason for refusing.

‘All right, let’s have dinner together,’ I said. ‘Can you make it the third of January?’

‘It’s a date. Eight o’clock at the Ritz bar. Does that suit you?’

‘Fine.’

I felt ill at ease. Oh, it isn’t that I cared much what he thought of me. No, not that. When I see my own likeness in the depths of someone else’s consciousness, I always experience a moment of panic. But it doesn’t last very long; I snap right out of it. What did bother me was having glimpsed Robert through eyes that weren’t mine. Had he really reached an impasse? I looked over at him and saw him take Paula by the waist and spin her around; with his other hand, he was drawing God only knows what in the air. Perhaps he was explaining something about the flow of time to her. In any case, they were both laughing; he didn’t give the least impression of being in danger. Were he in danger, he would surely have known it; Robert isn’t often mistaken and he never lies to himself. I went to the bay window and hid myself behind the red draperies. Scriassine had spoken quite a bit of nonsense, but he had posed certain questions I was unable to brush off so easily. During all these weeks, I had fled from questions. We’d been waiting so long for this moment – the liberation, victory – that I wanted to get all I could out of it. There would always be time enough tomorrow to think of the next day. Well, now I had thought of it, and I wondered what Robert thought. His doubts never produced a diminishing of activity, but on the contrary they stimulated him to excesses. Didn’t those long-drawn-out conversations, those letters, those telephone calls, those nocturnal debauches of work cover up a deep disturbance? He never hides anything from me, but sometimes he keeps certain worries temporarily to himself. And besides, I thought remorsefully, tonight he again repeated to Paula, ‘We’re at the crossroads.’ He said it often, and through cowardice I avoided giving those words their true weight. The crossroads. Therefore, in Robert’s eyes, the world was in danger. And he is the world for me. He was in danger! He spoke volubly as we were returning home, arm in arm, through the familiar darkness along the quays. But tonight his voice wasn’t enough to reassure me. He was bursting with what he had seen and heard, and he was very gay; when he has remained shut in for days and nights on end, the least occasion to go out becomes an event. When he spoke of the party, it seemed to me as if I had spent the evening with my eyes blindfolded and my ears stuffed with cotton. He had eyes all around his head and a dozen pairs of ears. I listened to him, but at the same time I continued questioning myself. He was never going to complete that journal he had kept so conscientiously all during the war. Why not? Was that a symptom? Of what?

‘Poor, unhappy Paula! It’s a catastrophe for a woman to be loved by a writer,’ Robert was saying. ‘She believed everything Perron told her about herself.’

I tried to concentrate on Paula. ‘I’m afraid the liberation went to her head,’ I said. ‘Last year, she had practically wiped out all her illusions. And now she’s beginning to play at being madly in love again. But she’s only playing.’

‘She wanted absolutely to make me say that time doesn’t exist,’ Robert said. ‘The best part of her life is behind her, and now that the war’s over she’s hoping to relive the past.’

‘Isn’t that what we were all hoping for?’ I asked. I thought I had spoken the words lightly, but Robert’s hand tightened around my arm.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘Not a thing; everything’s perfect,’ I said flippantly.

‘Come now! I know what it means when you start speaking in your worldly woman’s voice,’ Robert said. ‘I’m sure something’s churning in that little head of yours. How many glasses of punch did you have?’

‘Certainly less than you. And anyhow, the punch has nothing to do with it.’

‘Ah! You admit it!’ Robert said triumphantly. ‘Something is the matter and the punch has nothing to do with it. What is it then?’

‘Scriassine,’ I answered, laughing. ‘He explained to me why French intellectuals are done for.’

‘He’d like that!’

‘I know, but he frightened me anyhow.’

‘A great big girl like you who lets herself be frightened by the first prophet who comes along! I get a big kick out of Scriassine; he’s restless, he rambles on, boils up, makes you know he’s there. But you shouldn’t take him seriously.’

‘He said that politics will eat you up, that you’ll stop writing.’

‘And you believed him?’ Robert said gaily.

‘Well, it is true you’re not showing any sign of finishing your memoirs,’ I replied.

Robert paused for a second and then said, ‘That’s a special case.’

‘But why?’

‘There are too many weapons in those memoirs that can be used against me.’

‘That’s precisely why the thing is worth what it’s worth,’ I said spiritedly. ‘It’s so rare to find a man who dares to come out in the open! And when he does accept the dare, he invariably wins in the end.’

‘Yes,’ Robert said, ‘after he’s dead.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Now that I’m back in politics I have a lot of enemies. Do you realize how delighted they’d be the day those memoirs appeared in print?’

‘Your enemies will always find weapons to use against you, the ones in the journal or others,’ I said.

‘Just imagine those memoirs in the hands of Lafaurie, or Lachaume, or young Lambert. Or in the hands of any journalist, for that matter,’ Robert said.

Cut off completely from politics, from the future, from the public, not even knowing whether his journal would ever be published, Robert had rediscovered in its writing the adventure of the explorer venturing into an unnamed wilderness at random, without a trail to follow, without signs to warn him of its dangers. In my opinion, he had never written anything better. ‘If you become involved in politics,’ I said impatiently, ‘then you no longer have the right to write sincere books. Is that it?’

‘No, you can write sincere books but not scandalous ones,’ Robert replied. ‘And you know very well that nowadays there are a thousand things a man can’t speak about without causing a scandal.’ He smiled. ‘To tell the truth there isn’t much about any individual that doesn’t lend itself to scandal.’

We walked a few steps in silence and then I said, ‘You spent three years writing those memoirs. Doesn’t it bother you to leave them lying in the bottom of a drawer?’

‘I’ve stopped thinking about them. I have another book on my mind now.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘I’ll tell you all about it in a few days.’

I looked at Robert suspiciously. ‘And do you really believe you’ll find enough time to write?’

‘Of course.’

‘It doesn’t seem that certain to me. At the moment you don’t have a minute to yourself.’

‘In politics, it’s the beginning that’s the hardest. Afterwards you can take it easier.’

His voice sounded too confident. ‘And what if it doesn’t become easier?’ I persisted. ‘Would you get out of politics or would you stop writing?’

‘You know, it really wouldn’t be a great tragedy if I stopped writing for a little while,’ Robert answered with a smile. ‘I’ve scribbled a lot of words on a lot of paper in my life!’

I felt a wrench at my heart. ‘Just the other day you were saying your best works are still ahead of you.’

‘And I still think so. But they can wait a while.’

‘How long? A month? A year? Ten years?’ I asked.

‘Listen,’ Robert said in a conciliatory tone of voice, ‘one book more or less on earth isn’t as important as all that. And the political situation at present is extremely stimulating; I hope you realize that. This is the first time the left has ever held its fate in its own hands, the first chance to try to organize a group independent of the Communists without running the risk of serving the cause of the right. I’m not going to let this opportunity slip by! I’ve been waiting for it all my life.’

‘For my part, I think your books are more important,’ I said. ‘They bring people something unique and different. But when it comes to politics, you’re not the only one about who can become involved in it.’

‘But I’m the only one who can steer things in the direction I want them to take,’ Robert said cheerfully. ‘You of all people ought to understand me. The vigilance committees and the Resistance were useful, all right, but they were negative things. Today, it’s a question of building, and that’s much more interesting.’

‘I understand you very well, but your writing interests me more.’

‘Haven’t we always agreed that one doesn’t write just for the sake of writing?’ Robert said. ‘At certain times, other forms of action become more urgent.’

‘Not for you,’ I replied. ‘First and foremost, you’re a writer.’

‘You know that’s not true,’ Robert said reproachfully. ‘For me, the revolution comes first.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but you can best serve the revolution by writing your books.’

Robert shook his head. ‘That depends on the circumstances. We’re at a critical moment of history just now; first we have to win the political battle.’

‘And what happens if we don’t win it?’ I asked. ‘Do you really believe there’s a chance of a new war?’

‘I don’t believe a new war is going to start tomorrow,’ Robert replied. ‘But what has to be avoided at all cost is the creation of a situation in the world which might easily lead to war. If that happens, then we’ll sooner or later come to blows again. And we also have to prevent this victory from being exploited by capitalism.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘There are a lot of things that have to be prevented before one can afford to amuse oneself writing books that no one might ever read.’

I stopped dead in the middle of the street. ‘What? Do you believe that too? That people will lose interest in literature?’

‘Believe me, they’ll have a lot of other things to keep themselves busy with,’ Robert said in a voice that again seemed to me too reassuring.

‘The prospect doesn’t seem to bother you at all,’ I said indignantly. ‘But a world without literature and art would be horribly sad.’

‘In any event, there are millions of men at this very moment to whom literature means absolutely nothing,’ Robert replied.

‘Yes, but you always expected that to change.’

‘I still expect it to. What makes you think I don’t?’ Robert asked. ‘But that’s precisely it,’ he went on without waiting for me to answer. ‘If the world decides to change, there’s no doubt we’ll go through a period in which literature will be almost completely out of the picture.’

We went into the study and I sat down on the arm of one of the leather chairs. Yes, I had certainly drunk too much punch; the walls were spinning crazily. I looked at the table on which Robert had been writing night and day for twenty years. He was sixty now, and if this period of political upheaval dragged on for very long he ran the risk of never seeing the end of it. He couldn’t possibly be as indifferent to such a prospect as he tried to appear.

‘Let’s look into this thing a little,’ I said. ‘You believe your major works are still ahead of you and just five minutes ago you said you were going to begin a new book. That implies that you believe there are people around who want to read what you’ve written …’

‘Oh, I suppose that’s more than likely,’ Robert said. ‘But the opposite view can’t be rejected out of hand.’ He sat down next to me in the chair. ‘It’s not really as horrible as you might think,’ he added cheerfully. ‘Literature is created for men and not men for literature.’

‘It would be sad for you,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t be happy if you stopped writing.’

‘I don’t know,’ Robert replied with a grin. ‘I have no imagination.’

But he has. I remember how worried he was the night he said to me, ‘My major works are still ahead of me!’ He’s determined that those works shall have weight, permanence. It’s useless for him to protest; above all else he’s a writer. At first perhaps he had dreamed only of serving the revolution; literature was just a means. But it soon became an end; he loved it for itself and all his books prove it, especially those memoirs he doesn’t want published. He wrote them purely for the pleasure of writing. No, the truth is that he simply doesn’t want to talk about himself, and that reluctance isn’t a good sign.

‘As for me,’ I said, ‘I have plenty of imagination.’

The walls were spinning, but I was thinking very lucidly, much more lucidly than I do in the morning before breakfast. In the morning before eating, you’re on the defensive, you manage somehow not to know things you really do know. Suddenly I saw everything with perfect clarity. The war was ending and a new history in which nothing was guaranteed was beginning. And Robert’s future wasn’t guaranteed; it was perfectly possible for him to stop writing and even for all his published works to be swallowed up into nothingness.

‘What do you really think?’ I asked. ‘Do you think things will turn out good or bad?’

Robert began to laugh. ‘I’m not a prophet! But one thing is certain,’ he added. ‘We’re holding a lot of trumps.’

‘But what are the chances of winning?’

‘Shall I look into my crystal ball? Or would you like me to read your tea leaves?’

‘You don’t have to make fun of me,’ I said. ‘I have a right to ask a few questions from time to time.’

‘I ask myself a few, too, you know,’ Robert said.

Yes, he does ask himself questions, and graver ones than I do. Personally, I rarely act on my beliefs; that’s why I so easily become unhappy. I realize I’m wrong being that way, but with Robert it costs so little to be wrong.

‘But you only ask yourself those questions you’re able to answer,’ I said.

He laughed again. ‘Preferably, yes. The others don’t serve much purpose.’

‘That’s no reason not to ask them,’ I said. My voice was rising, but I wasn’t angry with Robert. I was angry with myself, with my blindness during these past weeks. ‘I’d still like to have some idea of what’s going to happen to us,’ I persisted.

‘Don’t you think it’s rather late?’ Robert asked. ‘We’ve both had a lot of punch to drink, and our minds will be a lot clearer tomorrow morning.’

Tomorrow morning the walls will stop spinning, the furniture and books will be in their proper places, always the same places. And my ideas, too, will fall back into place, and I’ll begin to live again from day to day, without turning my head, looking just so far and no farther into the future. I’ll stop paying attention to that discordant clatter in my heart. I’m tired of that diet. I looked at the cushion by the fireplace on which Diego used to sit. ‘A Nazi victory doesn’t enter into my plans,’ he had said. And then they had killed him.

‘Ideas are always too definite!’ I said. ‘The war is won. There’s a definite idea for you. Well, in my opinion we went to a very peculiar party tonight, with all the dead who weren’t there.’

‘There’s quite a difference between saying that their deaths served some purpose and none at all,’ Robert said.

‘Diego’s served no purpose at all,’ I retorted. ‘And what if it had?’ I added irritably. ‘It’s fine for the living, this system by which everything leads to something else. But the dead stay dead and we’re constantly betraying them; they don’t lead to anything.’

‘We don’t betray them by choice,’ Robert protested.

‘We betray them when we forget them and when we use them,’ I said. ‘Regret has to be useless or else it’s not really regret.’

Robert thought for a moment and then, with a perplexed look on his face, said, ‘I suppose I’ve no great talent for regretting. I don’t bother myself much with questions I can’t answer, things I can’t change.’ He paused a moment and added, ‘I don’t say I’m right about that.’

‘And I don’t say you’re wrong. In any case, the dead are dead and we go on living. All the regretting in the world won’t change that.’

Robert took my hand. ‘Don’t go looking for things to make you remorseful,’ he said. ‘We’ll also die, you know; that brings us very close to them, doesn’t it?’

I withdrew my hand; at that moment I was the enemy of all friendly feelings. I didn’t want to be consoled, not yet.

‘Your damned punch has really gone to my head,’ I said. ‘I’m going to bed.’

‘Yes, go to bed now. And tomorrow we’ll ask each other all the questions you want, even those that serve no purpose,’ Robert said.

‘And you? Aren’t you coming to bed?’

‘No, I think I’ll have a shower and do some work.’

‘There’s no doubt Robert is better armed than I against regrets,’ I thought, getting into bed. He works, acts; the future is more real to him than the past. And he writes. All the things that fall outside his normal course of life – misfortune, defeat, death – he puts into his books and considers himself rid of them. But I have no recourse; whatever I lose I can never regain, and there’s nothing to redeem my infidelities. Suddenly I began to weep. ‘These are my eyes that are weeping,’ I thought. ‘He sees everything, but not through my eyes.’ I was weeping, and for the first time in twenty years I was alone, alone with my remorse, my fear. I fell asleep and dreamed I was dead. I woke up with a start, and the fear was still there. And death continues to prowl silently in the room. I switch on the lights, turn them off; if Robert sees the ray of light under my door, he’ll worry. It’s useless; tonight he can’t help me. When I wanted to talk to him about himself, he evaded my questions. He knows he’s in danger; I’m afraid for him. Up to now I’ve always had the fullest confidence in him; I’ve never tried to measure him. For me the measure of all things was Robert. I’ve lived with him as I’ve lived with myself, no distance separating us. But, suddenly, I’ve lost all confidence – in everything. No fixed stars, no milestones. Robert is a man, a fallible, vulnerable man of sixty whom the past no longer protects and the future menaces. I lean back against the pillow, my eyes wide open. To see him better I’ve got to step backwards, far enough back to blot out the view of those twenty years of unquestioning love I’d given him.

It’s not easy. There was a time I did see him from a distance, but I was too young. I looked at him from too far off. Friends had pointed him out to me at the Sorbonne; they spoke of him a great deal, with a mixture of admiration and disapproval. It was whispered that he drank and frequented brothels. If that had been true, I think it would have attracted rather than repelled me; I was still rebelling against my pious childhood. In my mind, sin was a touching manifestation of the absence of God, and if someone had told me that Dubreuilh raped little girls I’d have taken him for a saint of sorts. But his vices were minor and his too-well-established fame irritated me. When I began taking his courses, I had already made up my mind that the ‘great man’ was a charlatan. Of course, he was different from all the other professors. He would come rushing into the room like a gust of wind; he was always four or five minutes late. He would survey us for a moment with his large, crafty eyes, and then he would begin speaking in either a very amiable or a very aggressive voice. There was something provocative in his surly face, his violent voice, his bursts of laughter which sometimes seemed to us a little insane. He wore very white shirts, his hands were always carefully manicured, and he was impeccably shaven; it was impossible, therefore, to attribute to negligence his zipper jackets, his pullovers, his clumsy shoes. He preferred comfort to decency with such an obvious lack of restraint that I thought it affected. I had read his novels and didn’t like them at all; I expected them to bring to me some inspiring message, and all they ever spoke to me of were indifferent people, frivolous sentiments, and a lot of other things that didn’t seem to me the least bit essential. As for his courses, they were interesting all right, but he never really said anything worthy of a genius. And he was always so cocksure of being right that I had an irresistible desire to contradict him. Oh, I was convinced, too, that the truth was to the left; ever since my childhood I had sniffed an odour of stupidity and lies in bourgeois thinking, a very foul-smelling odour. And then I had learned from the Gospel that all men are equal, are brothers; that’s one thing I continue to believe in with an unshakable faith. But spiritually, after I had been for so long crammed full of absolutes, the void left in the heavens made a mockery of all morality I had been taught. But Dubreuilh believed there could be salvation here on earth. I let him know where I stood in my first essay. ‘Revolution, fine,’ I said, ‘but what then?’ When he gave me back my paper a week later as we were leaving the classroom, he ridiculed my efforts. According to him, my absolute was the abstract dream of a petty bourgeoise incapable of facing reality. Of course I couldn’t hold my own against him, and he won every round. But that didn’t prove anything, and I told him as much. We resumed our discussion the following week and this time he tried to convince me, rather than overwhelm me. I had to admit that in private discussion he didn’t at all seem to feel that he was a great man. He began chatting with me, rather often after classes, sometimes he walked home with me occasionally taking a longer route than was necessary. And then we began going out together in the afternoons, the evenings. We stopped talking about morality and politics and other lofty subjects. He told me about the people he knew and the things he did, and most of all he would take me for walks, show me streets, squares, quays, canals, cemeteries, suburbs, warehouses, vacant sites, little cafés, and a hundred corners of Paris that were completely new to me. And I began to realize that I had never really seen things I believed I had always known; with him everything took on a thousand meanings – faces, voices, people’s clothing, a tree poster, a neon sign, no matter what. I reread all his novels. And I soon realized I had completely misunderstood them the first time. Dubreuilh gave the impression of writing capriciously, for his own pleasure, completely without motivation. And yet on closing the book, you felt yourself overwhelmed with anger, disgust, revolt; you wanted things to change. To read certain passages from his works, you would take him for a pure aesthete; he has a feeling for words, and he’s interested in things for themselves, in rain and clear skies, in the games of love and chance, in everything. Only he doesn’t stop there; suddenly you find yourself thrown in among people, and all their problems become your concern. That’s why I’m so determined for him to continue writing; I know through my own experience what he can bring to his readers. There’s no gap between his political ideas and his poetic emotions. Because he himself loves life so much, he wants all men to be able to share it abundantly. And because he loves people, everything that’s part of their lives interests him deeply.

I reread his books, listened to him, questioned him; I was so taken up with this new life of mine that I didn’t even think of asking myself why, exactly, he enjoyed being with me. I was already so involved that I had no time to discover what was happening inside my own heart. When one night he took me in his arms in the middle of the Jardins du Carrousel, I was offended. ‘I will only kiss a man I love,’ I said coldly. ‘But you do love me!’ he answered calmly. And when he said it, I knew it was true. I hadn’t been aware of it; it had all happened too fast. With Robert, everything happened so fast! In fact, that was precisely the quality in him that had captivated me at first. Other people were so slow, life was so slow. He burned up time and pushed everything out of his way. From the moment I knew I loved him, I followed him eagerly from surprise to surprise. I learned that one could live without furniture and without schedules, skip lunches, not go to bed at night, sleep in the afternoon, make love in a wood as well as in bed. It seemed a simple and joyous thing to me to become a woman in his arms; when the pleasure was frightening, his smile would reassure me. A single shadow lay over my heart – term was nearly over and the thought of being separated from him terrified me. Robert obviously realized that. Was that why he suggested we get married? The idea had never even crossed my mind; at nineteen, it seems as natural to be loved by the man with whom you’re in love as by doting parents or all-powerful God.

‘But I really did love you!’ Robert told me much later. Coming from him, what precisely did those words mean? Would he have loved me a year earlier when he was still taken up body and soul in political battles? And the year I came to know him, couldn’t he have chosen someone else as consolation for his inactivity? That’s the kind of question that serves no purpose whatsoever. Let’s drop it. One thing was definitely certain: he was determined to make me happy, and he did not fail. Up to then I hadn’t been unhappy, but neither had I been happy. I was always in good health and occasionally I had moments which I enjoyed. But most of the time I was plainly and simply disconsolate. Foolishness, lies, injustice, suffering; all around me a deep, black chaos. And how absurd it all was! Those days which repeated themselves from week to week, from century to century, without ever getting anywhere. Living was simply a matter of waiting some forty or sixty years for death to come, trudging along through emptiness. That was why I studied so avidly: only books and ideas were able to hold their own; they alone seemed real to me.

Thanks to Robert, ideas were brought down to earth and the earth became coherent, like a book, a book that begins badly but will finish well. Humanity was going somewhere; history had meaning, and so did my own existence. Oppression and misery contained within themselves the promise of their disappearance; evil had already been conquered, shame swept away. The sky closed above my head and the old fears left me. Robert hadn’t freed me with theories; he simply showed me that to live was sufficient unto life. He didn’t give a damn about death, and his activities weren’t merely diversions; he liked what he liked, wanted what he wanted, and ran from nothing. Quite simply, all I wanted was to be like him. If I had questioned life, it was mostly because I was bored at home. And now I was no longer bored. From chaos, Robert had drawn a full, orderly world, cleansed by the future he was helping to produce. And that world was mine. I had to make my own place in it. Being Robert’s wife wasn’t enough; before marrying him I had never pictured myself making a career of being a wife. On the other hand, I never for a moment dreamed of taking an active part in politics. In that domain, theories can interest me deeply and I harbour a few strong feelings, but practical politics aren’t for me. I have to admit that I lack patience; the revolution is on the march, but it’s marching so slowly, with such tiny, uncertain steps! For Robert, if one solution is better than another, that’s the correct one; a lesser evil he considers a good. He’s right, of course, but no doubt I haven’t completely buried my old dreams of the absolute. It does not satisfy me. And then the future seems so very far off; I find it hard to become interested in men who aren’t born yet. I would much rather help those who are alive at this very moment. That’s why my profession attracted me. Oh, I never believed that you could, from the outside, supply people with a prefabricated salvation. But sometimes only trifles separate them from happiness, and I felt I could at least sweep away those trifles. Robert encouraged me. In that respect he differs from orthodox Communists; he believes that psychoanalysis can play a useful role in bourgeois society and that it might still be of use even in a classless society. And the possibility of rethinking classical psychoanalysis in terms of Marxist ideology struck him as a fascinating idea. The fact of the matter is that my work did interest me, and very deeply. My days were as full as the earth around me. Every morning I awakened more joyously than the day before and every evening I found myself enriched with a thousand new discoveries. It’s an incredible stroke of luck, when you’re only twenty years old, to be given the world by the hand you love. And it’s equally lucky to find your exact place in that world. Robert also accomplished another feat; he guarded me against isolation without depriving me of privacy. We shared everything in common; and yet I had my own friendships, my own pleasures, my work, my worries. If I wanted to, I could spent the night nestled against a tender shoulder. Or, like tonight, I could remain alone and chaste in my room. I look at the four walls and the rays of light under the door; how many times have I known the sweetness of falling asleep while he was working within earshot. It’s been years since we lost our desire for each other, but we were too closely bound in other ways to attach any great importance to the union of our bodies. Therefore we had, so to speak, lost nothing. It seems almost like a pre-war night tonight. Even this worrying that’s been keeping me awake isn’t new; the future of the world has often seemed very black. What is it, then, that’s different? Why has death come prowling again in my room? It continues to prowl. Why?

What stupid obstinacy! I’m ashamed. During these past four years, in spite of all that’s happened, I somehow managed to persuade myself that everything would be the same after the war as it was before. In fact, only a little while ago I was saying to Paula, ‘It’s just like it used to be, isn’t it?’ This is what I am trying to say to myself: the way it is now is exactly the way it used to be. But no, I’m lying to myself; it’s not and it never again will be the same. Up to now, I always knew in my heart that we would somehow pull out of the gravest crises. Certainly Robert had to pull out of them; his destiny guaranteed that of the world and vice versa. But with the horrifying past behind us, how can anyone have any faith in the future? Diego is dead, too many others have died; shame has returned to the earth, the word ‘happiness’ has lost all meaning. All around me, nothing but chaos again. Maybe the world will pull out of it. But when? Two or three centuries are much too long; our own days are numbered. If Robert’s life ends in defeat, in doubt, in despair, nothing will ever make up for it.

I hear a slight movement in his study; he’s reading, thinking, planning. Will he succeed? And if not, what then? No need to think of the worst; until now, no one has ever eaten us up. We just go on existing, following the whim of a story that isn’t ours at all. And Robert has been reduced to the role of a passive witness. What will he do with himself? I know how much the revolution means to him; it’s his absolute. The experiences of his youth left an indelible mark upon him; during all those years he spent growing up among soot-coloured houses and lives, socialism was his only hope. And it wasn’t because of generosity or logic that he believed in it, but because of necessity. For him, becoming a man meant only one thing: becoming a militant partisan, like his father. It took quite a lot to make him withdraw from politics – the infuriating disillusionment of ’14, his rupture with Cachin two years after Tours, his inability to awaken the old revolutionary flame in the Socialist Party. At the first opportunity, he leaped eagerly into the political arena again, and now he’s more excited about it than ever. To reassure myself I tell myself that he has all manner of resources at his command. After our marriage, during the years he spent away from active politics, he wrote a great deal and was happy. But was he? I chose to believe it, and until tonight I never dared pry into what really went on inside him. I no longer feel very certain about our past. If he wanted a child so soon, it was probably because I alone wasn’t enough to justify his existence. Or perhaps he was trying to take revenge against that future which he could no longer control. Yes, that desire of his to become a father seems rather significant now that I look back upon it. And the sadness of our pilgrimage to Bruay is significant, too. We walked through the streets of his childhood and he showed me the school where his father had taught, the sombre building in which, at the age of nine, he had heard Jaurès. He told me about his first encounters with daily routine and disappointment with pointless work; he was speaking very fast, he sounded very uninterested, and then suddenly he said heatedly, ‘Nothing has changed. But I write novels!’ I wanted to believe it was only a fleeting emotion; Robert was much too lighthearted for me to imagine that he had any serious regrets. But after the Congress of Amsterdam, during that whole period when he was busily organizing vigilance committees, I saw him as he acted when he was really happy, and I had to admit the truth to myself: before then, he had been straining at the leash. If now he finds himself condemned once more to impotence, to solitude, everything will seem useless to him, even writing. Especially writing. Between ’25 and ’32, when he was holding himself in check, he wrote, yes. But it was a lot different then. He still had close ties with the Communists and some of the Socialists; he nourished the hope of a united workers’ front and of a final victory. I know by heart that phrase of Jaurès he used to repeat at every opportunity: ‘The man of tomorrow will be the most complex, the richest in life, that history has ever known.’ He was convinced his books would help to build the future and that the man of tomorrow would read them. That being the case, he wrote. But faced with a sealed future, writing becomes meaningless. If his contemporaries stop listening to him, if posterity no longer understands him, there’s nothing left but to be silent.

And what then? What will become of him? It’s awful to think of a living creature turning into foam, but there’s an even worse fate: that of a paralysed man who can’t move his tongue. It’s far better to be dead. Will I find myself some day hoping for Robert’s death? No. That’s unthinkable. He’s had hard blows before and he’s always got over them. He’ll get over them again. I don’t know how, but he’ll surely think of something. It’s not entirely impossible, for example, that one day he’ll become a member of the Communist Party. Now, of course, he wouldn’t dream of doing it; his criticisms of their policies are too violent. But suppose the party line changes, suppose there comes a day when, excepting for the Communists, there is no coherence left. If that ever happens I wonder if Robert won’t end up by joining them rather than remaining inactive. I don’t like that idea. It would be much harder for him than for anyone else to take orders with which he didn’t agree; he’s always had his own definite opinions on what tactics to use. And it would be useless for him to attempt to be cynical; I know he’ll always remain faithful to his old principles. The idealism of others makes him smile; he has his own, and there are certain Communist methods he would never accept. No, that’s no solution. There are far too many things that keep them apart; his humanism isn’t the same as theirs. Not only would he be unable to write anything sincere, but he would be forced to reject his whole past.

‘Too bad,’ he’ll tell me. Just a little while ago he said, ‘One book more or less isn’t very important.’ But does he really believe that? As for me, I value books greatly, too much perhaps. When I was an adolescent, I preferred books to the world of reality, and something of that has remained with me – a slight taste for eternity. Yes, that’s one of the reasons why I take Robert’s writings so much to heart. If they perish, both of us will once more become perishable; the future will be nothing but the grave. Robert doesn’t see things that way, but neither is he the perfect militant completely unconcerned with himself. He definitely hopes to leave a name behind him, a name that will mean a great deal to a great many people. And after all, writing is the thing he loves most in the world; it’s his joy, his necessity; it’s he, himself. Renouncing writing would be suicide for him.

Well, all he would have to do is resign himself to writing to order. Others do it. Others, but not Robert. If I had to, I could imagine him working actively for a cause halfheartedly. But writing is something else again; if he were no longer able to express himself freely, the pen would fall from his hand.

Now I see the impasse. Robert believes completely in certain ideas, and before the war we were positive that one day they would be realized. His whole life has been devoted to enriching them and preparing for their birth. But suppose they’re never born? Suppose the revolution takes a different tack, turns against the humanism Robert has always defended. What can he do? If he helps build a future hostile to all the values in which he believes, his struggle becomes absurd. But if he stubbornly insists on maintaining values that will never come down to earth, he becomes one of those old dreamers whom, above all, he has always wanted not to emulate. No, between those alternatives, no choice is possible. In either case, it would mean defeat, impotence; and for Robert that would be a living death. That’s why he’s thrown himself so energetically into the fight. He tells me the present situation offers an opportunity he’s been waiting for all his life. All right. But it also carries with it a graver danger than any he has ever experienced, and he knows it. Yes, I’m sure he’s already told himself everything I’ve been thinking. He’s told himself that his future might be nothing but the grave, that he’ll be buried without leaving any more trace of himself than Rosa and Diego. And it’s even worse: perhaps the men of tomorrow will look upon him as a dunderhead, a fool, a charlatan, a drone, a complete failure. It may even be that one day he’ll be tempted to look upon himself through their mean, cruel eyes. In that case, he’ll live out the rest of his life in disillusionment. Robert disillusioned! That would be an even more intolerable horror than death itself. I can accept my death and his, but never his disillusionment. No. To think of waking up tomorrow, and the next day, and all the days that follow, with that monstrous menace on the horizon! I won’t stand for it. No. But I can say no, no, no; I can say it a hundred times, and it won’t change a thing. I’ll wake up facing that menace tomorrow and all the days after that. When you’re faced with an inescapable fact, you can at least choose to die. But when it’s nothing more than a baseless fear, you have to go on living with it.