The Mandarins

‘You know, you can get French wine in this drugstore,’ Lambert said cheerfully. ‘Tonight we’ll eat as well as a German prisoner-of-war.’

‘Do you resent the fact that the Yanks feed their prisoners well?’

‘No, not especially. But as for the average Frenchman who’s living on air – it makes him sick. It’s just that the whole thing stinks – the way they handle the Fritzes, including the Nazis, with such consideration, and the way they treat the concentration camp prisoners.’

‘I’d like to know if it’s true that they’re keeping the French Red Cross from going into the camps,’ Henri said.

‘That’s the first thing I intend to look into,’ Lambert replied.

‘We’re not very hot on America these days,’ Henri said as he filled his plate with tinned meat and noodles.

‘And there’s no good reason to be!’ Lambert knitted his brow. ‘It’s just too bad it makes Lachaume so damned happy.’

‘I was thinking about that as I was walking over here,’ Henri said. ‘You say a word against the Communist Party, and you’re playing into the hands of the reactionaries! You criticize Washington, and you’re a Communist. Unless they suspect you of being a fifth columnist.’

‘Fortunately, two truths balance each other out,’ Lambert said.

Henri shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t count on that too much. So you remember how at the Christmas party we were saying we shouldn’t allow L’Espoir to become regimented? Well, that’s a whole lot easier said than done.’

‘It’s just a question of speaking as our consciences dictate!’ Lambert said.

‘Did you ever stop to think what that means?’ Henri asked. ‘Every morning I tell a hundred thousand people how they ought to think. And what do I guide myself by? The voice of my conscience!’ He poured himself a glass of wine. ‘It’s a gigantic swindle!’

Lambert smiled. ‘Show me a journalist who’s more scrupulous than you,’ he said affectionately. ‘You personally open every telegram, you keep your eyes on everything.’

‘I always try to be honest,’ Henri said. ‘But that’s the trouble; it doesn’t give me the time to really study the things I talk about.’

‘Nonsense! Your readers are more than happy with what you give them,’ Lambert said. ‘I know a hell of a lot of students who swear by L’Espoir.’

‘That only makes me feel more guilty!’ Henri replied.

Lambert gave him a worried look. ‘You’re not going to start studying statistics all day long, I hope.’

‘That’s just what I ought to do.’ There was a brief silence and then suddenly Henri decided the moment had come to unburden himself. ‘I brought back your stories,’ he said. He smiled at Lambert. ‘It’s funny, you’ve had lots of interesting experiences, you’ve lived them hard, and I’ve often been fascinated hearing you tell about them. Your articles are always full of meat. And yet in these stories nothing seems to happen. I’ve been wondering why.’

‘You don’t think they’re any good, do you?’ Lambert said. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, I warned you.’

‘The trouble is you haven’t put anything of yourself into them,’ Henri said.

Lambert hesitated. ‘The things that really affect me wouldn’t be interesting to anyone else.’

Henri smiled. ‘But it’s all too obvious that the ones you do talk about don’t affect you at all. You get the feeling that you wrote these stories as if you were writing a hundred lines for punishment.’

‘I never really did believe I had any talent,’ Lambert said.

The forced smile which Lambert somehow managed only confirmed Henri’s feeling that these stories were actually very important to him. ‘Who’s talented and who isn’t?’ he said. ‘It’s hard to say what that really means. No, you simply made a mistake in picking subjects that mean so little to you. That’s all. Next time try putting more of yourself into your writing.’

‘I wouldn’t know how,’ Lambert said. He laughed. ‘I’m the perfect example of the poor little intellectual who’s utterly incapable of ever being creative.’

‘Don’t be an ass!’ Henri said. ‘These stories don’t prove a thing. It’s natural to miss the target the first time.’

Lambert shook his head. ‘I know myself. I’ll never accomplish anything worth while. And an intellectual who accomplishes nothing is pretty pitiful.’

‘You’ll do something if you’re really determined to. And besides, being an intellectual is no disgrace!’

‘It’s nothing much to be proud of either,’ Lambert replied.

‘Well, I’m one, and you seem to have a pretty high opinion of me.’

‘With you, it’s different,’ Lambert said.

‘Not at all. I’m an intellectual, period. And it annoys hell out of me when they make that word an insult.’

He sought Lambert’s eyes, but Lambert was looking obstinately at his plate. ‘I wonder what I’ll do when the war’s over,’ he said.

‘You don’t want to stay in journalism?’

‘Being a war correspondent is more or less defensible. But a “peace” correspondent – I can’t see it,’ Lambert said, adding spiritedly, ‘Yes, it’s well worth it, being the kind of journalist you are; it’s a real adventure. But being an editor, even with L’Espoir, wouldn’t mean anything to me unless I had to earn my living by it. On the other hand, living off my income would give me a bad conscience.’ He hesitated and then continued, ‘My mother left me too damned much money; no matter what, I’ll have a bad conscience.’

‘And so does everyone else,’ Henri said.

‘But everything you have, you earn. There’s no question about that.’

‘No one ever has a perfectly clear conscience,’ Henri said. ‘For example, it’s utterly childish for me to be eating here when I refuse to go to black-market restaurants. All of us have our little tricks. Dubreuilh pretends to look upon money as a natural element. He has a hell of a lot of it, but he does nothing to earn it, never refuses anyone a loan, and leaves it up to Anne to manage it. And as for Anne, she puts her mind at rest by not considering it as her own; she tells herself she’s spending it for her husband and her daughter, making a comfortable life for them which she, by chance, happens to profit from. The thing that helps me is that I have a devil of a time balancing my budget; it gives me the feeling that I don’t have anything to spare. But that’s just another way of cheating, too.’

‘Still there’s a difference.’

Henri shook his head. ‘When conditions are unfair, you can’t very well live a blameless life. And that’s the real reason for going into politics – to try to change conditions.’

‘I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t give away that money’, Lambert said. ‘But what good would that do?’ He hesitated. ‘Besides, I have to admit that the prospect of being poor frightens me.’

‘Why don’t you try to use it effectively?’

‘That’s just it! How? What can I do with it?’

‘There must be some things that interest you?’

‘I wonder …’ Lambert replied.

‘There are things you enjoy, aren’t there? Don’t tell me there isn’t anything in the world you enjoy!’ Henri said a trifle impatiently.

‘Yes, I enjoy having friends, but ever since the liberation we do nothing but argue. Women? Either they’re idiots or they’re unbearable. Books? I’ve got so many now I don’t know what to do with them. And as for travelling, the world is too sad. And then, for some time now, I’ve not been able to distinguish good from evil,’ he concluded.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘A year ago, everything seemed as simple as a kid’s painting book. But now you begin to realize that the Americans are beasts as racialist as the Nazis, and that they don’t give a damn if people go on dying in concentration camps. And speaking of concentration camps, it seems as if they’ve got a few in Russia that aren’t very pretty, either. Here they shoot some of the collaborators. And some of the other bastards, who were just as bad, get garlanded with flowers.’

‘If you can get angry, that means you still do believe in certain things.’

‘No, frankly, when you begin asking yourself questions, nothing stands up. There are a lot of values you’re supposed to take as fundamental facts. In the name of what? When you get right down to it, why freedom? Why equality? Does justice have any meaning? Why give a damn about other people? A man who wants nothing else but to enjoy life, like my father, is he so wrong?’ Lambert gave Henri a worried look. ‘Am I shocking you?’

‘Not at all. Sometimes you have to ask yourself questions.’

‘More than that, there has to be someone to answer them,’ Lambert said, his voice growing heated. ‘They beat us over the head with politics, but why side with one party rather than another? First of all, we need a set of principles, an approach to life.’ With a trace of defiance in his eyes, Lambert looked steadily at Henri. ‘That’s what you ought to give us; it would be a damned sight more worthwhile than helping Dubreuilh write manifestos.’

‘A set of principles necessarily includes a political attitude,’ Henri said. ‘And on the other hand, politics is itself a living thing.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Lambert replied. ‘In politics, all you’re concerned with are abstract things that don’t exist – the future, masses of people. But what is really concrete is the actual present moment, and people as separate and single individuals.’

‘But each individual is affected by collective history,’ Henri said.

‘The trouble is that in politics you never come down from the high plateau of history to the problem of the lowly individual,’ Lambert said. ‘You get lost in generalities and no one gives a damn about particular cases.’

Lambert’s voice as he spoke these words was so determined that Henri looked at him curiously. ‘For example?’ he said.

‘Well, for example, take the question of guilt. Politically, abstractly, people who worked with the Germans are no-good bastards not fit to spit upon. No problem, right? But now, when you look at one of them all by himself, close up, it isn’t at all the same any more.’

‘You’re thinking of your father?’ Henri asked.

‘Yes. I’ve been wanting to ask your advice about that for some time now. Should I really continue to turn my back on him so stubbornly?’

‘But my God! The way you were talking about him last year!’ Henri said, surprised.

‘Because at that time, I thought he had denounced Rosa. But he convinced me he had no part in it; everybody knew she was Jewish. No, my father was involved in “economic” collaboration, which is bad enough. But after all, he’s getting old, and they’re going to make him stand trial, and it’s almost certain he’ll be convicted …’

‘You’ve seen him again?’

‘Once. And since then he’s sent me several letters, letters that rather upset me, I must admit.’

‘If you feel like making up with him, you’re perfectly free to do so,’ Henri said. ‘But I always thought you got along so badly?’ he added.

‘When I first met you, yes.’ Lambert paused a moment and then continued with some effort. ‘He raised me, you know. I believe that in his own way he liked me a lot; only you could never disobey him.’

‘Before you got to know Rosa, you’d never disobeyed him?’ Henri asked.

‘No. That’s what made him furious; it was the first time I ever went against him,’ Lambert said. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I suppose it suited me to believe he denounced her; that way, there wasn’t any problem. I’d have killed him with my own hands at the time.’

‘But what made you suspect him?’

‘Some friends of mine put the idea in my head – Vincent among others. But I talked to Vincent about it again; he has absolutely no proof, not a shred. My father swore on the grave of my mother that it was a lie. Now that I’ve cooled off and can look at things objectively again I’m convinced he could never have done a thing like that. Never.’

‘It would have been a ghastly thing to do,’ Henri said. He hesitated for a moment. Now Lambert hoped that his father was innocent, just as two years earlier, without any proof, he had hoped he was guilty. And there was probably no way of ever knowing the truth. ‘Vincent likes to think of himself as a cloak-and-dagger character,’ Henri said. ‘Listen, if you no longer have any reason to suspect your father, if personally you don’t bear him any grudge, it’s not for you to act as his judge. Go and see him, do as you see fit, and don’t worry about what anyone else has to say.’

‘Do you really think I can?’ Lambert asked.

‘Who’s to stop you?’

‘Don’t you think it would be a sign of infantilism?’

Henri gave Lambert a surprised look. ‘Infantilism?’

Lambert blushed. ‘I suppose I mean cowardice.’

‘Not in the least. It’s not cowardly to live as you see fit.’

‘Yes,’ Lambert said, ‘you’re right. I’ll write to him.’ Gratefully, he added, ‘I’m glad I talked to you about it.’ He dipped his spoon into the small saucer of pink, shimmering gelatine. ‘You could really help us so much,’ he murmured. ‘Not only myself, but a lot of other young people who are in the same boat.’

‘Help you in what way?’ Henri asked.

‘You have the sense of what is real. You ought to teach us how to live for the moment.’

Henri smiled. ‘Formulating a set of principles, an approach to life, doesn’t exactly enter into my plans.’

His eyes shining, Lambert looked up at Henri. ‘Oh, I stated that badly. I wasn’t thinking of a theoretical treatise. But there are things that you consider important, there are values you believe in. You ought to show us the pleasant things on earth. And you could also make it a little more livable by writing beautiful books. It seems to me that that is what literature should do.’

Lambert delivered his little speech in a single breath. It seemed to Henri that he had prepared it in advance and that for days he had been waiting for the right moment to get it off his chest.

‘Literature isn’t necessarily pleasant,’ he said.

‘But it is!’ Lambert said. ‘Even things that are sad become pleasant when they’re done artistically.’ He hesitated. ‘Maybe pleasant isn’t exactly the right word, but it’ll do.’ He paused again and blushed. ‘I’m not trying to dictate to you what you should write. Only you mustn’t forget that you are first and foremost a writer, an artist.’

‘I never do forget it,’ Henri said.

‘I know, but …’ Once more Lambert paused, seemed embarrassed. ‘For example, your series on Portugal is very good, but I remember those pages you once wrote on Sicily. It makes you feel a little sad not to find anything like them in what you’re writing now.’

‘If you ever go to Portugal, you won’t feel very much like describing pomegranates in bloom,’ Henri said.

‘I wish you’d feel that way again,’ Lambert said urgently. ‘Why not? You certainly have the right to stroll along the seaside without worrying about the price of sardines.’

‘But the fact is that I couldn’t,’ Henri replied.

‘After all,’ Lambert continued vehemently, ‘we fought in the Resistance to defend the individual, to defend his right to be himself and to be happy. It’s time now to reap what we sowed.’

‘The trouble is that there are several hundred million individuals for whom that right still doesn’t exist,’ Henri said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘I think it’s precisely because we began to take notice of them that we can no longer stop.’

‘Then everybody has to wait for the whole world to be happy before trying to be happy?’ Lambert said. ‘And art and literature must be put off until that golden age? It’s now, right now, that we need them!’

‘I don’t say one has to stop writing,’ Henri replied. He paused; Lambert’s reproach had touched a sore spot. Yes, there were a great many other things to be said about Portugal, and it was with no little regret that he had pushed them aside. An artist, a writer – that’s what he wanted to be, that’s what he had to keep in mind at all times. Long ago he had made great promises to himself; now was the time to keep them. Precocious triumphs, a too-opportune book, too highly praised – he wanted something else more than that. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he resumed, ‘I’ve just got started on the kind of novel you’ll like. Just a story, in which I’ll write what I please for my own pleasure.’

‘Really?’ Lambert said, his face brightening. ‘Have you done very much? Is it going well?’

‘Beginnings, you know, are always thankless. But it’s coming along!’ Henri replied.

‘You don’t know how happy I am to hear that!’ Lambert said. ‘It would be a damned shame if you let yourself be eaten up!’

‘I won’t let myself be eaten up,’ Henri said.

‘How’s your light novel coming along?’ Paula asked.

‘It’s coming,’ Henri replied.

She stretched herself out on the bed behind him, and he felt her eyes studying the back of his neck. She made him feel uneasy, but it would have been unkind of him to chase her out. After all, eyes make no noise. He tried to concentrate on the novel. During the past month, he had made several decisions and had finally resigned himself to setting the story in 1935. Perhaps it was a mistake – for days now, sentences had been withering at the tip of his pen.

‘Yes, it is a mistake,’ he said to himself decisively. He had wanted to write about himself. Well, he had nothing in common with the person he had been in 1935. His political indifference, his curiosity, his ambition, all that stubborn insistence on individualism – how quickly it passed, how foolish it was! It presupposed a future without obstacles, with guaranteed progress, the immediate brotherhood of man, and peace everlasting. Above all it presupposed selfishness and thoughtlessness. Oh, he would no doubt have been able to find excuses enough. But he was writing this book in order to try to tell the truth about his life, not to explain away its faults. ‘It has to be written in the present,’ he decided. He reread the last few pages. It was a pity to think that the past was going to be finally buried – his arrival in Paris, his first meetings with Dubreuilh, the trip to Djerba. ‘I’ve lived them; that should be enough,’ he said to himself. But if you take that position then the present is also enough, life itself is enough. And it obviously wasn’t, for he had to write to feel himself completely alive. Too bad then. In any case you can’t salvage everything. The question was to know what to say about himself, about himself today. ‘How far have I come? What do I want?’ It was funny – if you’re so set on expressing yourself, it’s because you feel you’re unique. And he was not even able to say in what way he thought he was! ‘Who am I?’ He did not ask himself that question in the past; then it had always been the others who were defined, had limits. But not he. His books and life were still ahead of him. It enabled him to dismiss all adverse criticism, and from the heights of his future works to look on everyone, even Dubreuilh, with a little condescension. But now, he had to admit to himself that he was a mature man: young people treated him as an elder, adults as one of them, and some even treated him with respect. Mature, bounded, finite, himself and no one else, nothing but himself. But who was he? In a way, his books would ultimately decide; but on the other hand, he had to know the truth about himself in order to write them. At first sight, the meaning of those months he had just lived through was quite clear, but if you looked more closely everything became hazy. Helping people to think straight, to live better lives – was his heart really set on it, or was it only a humanitarian daydream? Was he really interested in what happened to others, or only in soothing his own conscience? And literature? What meaning did it now hold for him? There’s nothing more abstract than wanting to write when you have nothing urgent to say. His pen hung motionless above the paper and he thought irritably that Paula was there behind him, watching him not write.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.