The Mandarins

‘I can’t get away from the paper before eleven,’ Henri replied.

‘Then stop by at eleven,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘We have to go over the whole deal, and I’d very much like you to be there.’

Henri smiled. ‘I don’t quite see why.’

‘I told him that you work with me, but your actually being there will carry more weight.’

‘I doubt if it would mean very much to someone like Samazelle,’ Henry said, still smiling. ‘He must know I’m not a politician.’

‘But, like myself, he thinks that politics should never again be left to politicians,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘Come over, even if it’s only for a few minutes. Samazelle has an interesting group behind him. Young fellows; we need them.’

‘Now listen,’ Paula said angrily, ‘you’re not going to start talking politics again! Tonight’s a holiday.’

‘So?’ Dubreuilh said. ‘Is there a law against talking about things that interest you on holidays?’

‘Why do you insist on dragging Henri into this thing?’ Paula asked. ‘He knocks himself out enough already. And he’s told you again and again that politics bore him.’

‘I know,’ Dubreuilh said with a smile, ‘you think I’m an old reprobate trying to debauch his little friends. But politics isn’t a vice, my beauty, nor a parlour game. If a new war were to break out three years from now, you’d be the first to howl.’

‘That’s blackmail,’ Paula said. ‘When this war finally ends its coming to an end, no one is going to feel like starting a new one.’

‘Do you think that what people feel like doing means anything at all?’ Dubreuilh asked.

Paula started to answer, but Henri cut her off. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just that I haven’t got the time.’

‘There’s always time,’ Dubreuilh countered.

‘For you, yes,’ Henri said, laughing. ‘But me, I’m just a normal human being; I can’t work twenty hours at a stretch or go without sleep for a month.’

‘And neither can I!’ Dubreuilh said. ‘I’m not eighteen any more. No one is asking that much of you,’ he added, tasting the punch with a worried look.

Henri looked at him cheerfully. Eighteen or eighty, Dubreuilh, with his huge, laughing eyes that consumed everything in sight, would always look just as young. What a zealot! By comparison, Henri was often tempted to think of himself as dissipated, lazy, weak. But it was useless to drive himself. At twenty, he had had so great an admiration for Dubreuilh that he felt himself compelled to ape him. The result was that he was constantly sleepy, loaded himself with medicines, sank almost into a stupor. Now he had to make up his mind once and for all. With no time for himself he had lost his taste for life and the desire to write. He had become a machine. For four years he had been a machine, and now he was determined above all else to become a man again.

‘I wonder just how my inexperience could help you,’ he said.

‘Oh, inexperience has its advantages,’ Dubreuilh replied with a wry smile. ‘Besides, just now you have a name that means a lot to a lot of people.’ His smile broadened. ‘Before the war, Samazelle was in and out of every political faction and all the factions of factions. But that’s not why I want him; I want him because he’s a hero of the Maquis. His name carries a lot of weight.’

Henri began to laugh. Dubreuilh never seemed more ingenuous to him than when he tried being cynical. Paula was right, of course, to accuse him of blackmail; if he really believed in the imminence of a third world war, he would not have been in so good a mood. The truth of the matter was that he saw possibilities for action opening before him and he was burning to exploit them. Henri, however, felt less enthusiastic. Clearly, he had changed since ’39. Before then, he had been on the left because the bourgeoisie disgusted him, because injustice roused his indignation, because he considered all men his brothers – fine, generous sentiments which involved him in absolutely nothing. Now he knew that if he really wanted to break away from his class, he would have to risk some personal loss. Malefilatre, Bourgoin, Picard had taken the risk and lost at the edge of the little woods, but he would always think of them as living men. He had sat with them at a table in front of a rabbit stew, and they drank white wine and spoke of the future without much believing in what they were saying. Four of a kind, they were then. But with the war over they would once again have become a bourgeois, a farmer, and two mill hands. At that moment, sitting with them, Henri understood that in the eyes of the three others, and in his own eyes as well, he was one of the privileged classes, more or less disreputable, even if well-intentioned. And he knew there was only one way of remaining their friend: by continuing to do things with them. He understood this even more clearly when in ’41, he worked with the Bois Colombes group. At the beginning things didn’t go very well. Flamand exasperated him by incessantly repeating, ‘Me, I’m a worker, you know; I think like a worker.’ But thanks to him Henri became aware of something he knew nothing about before, something which, from that time on, he would always feel menacing him. Hate. He had taken the bite out of it; in their common struggle, they had accepted him as a comrade. But if ever he should become an indifferent bourgeois again, the hatred would come to life, and with good reason. Unless he showed proof to the contrary, he was the enemy of several hundred million men an enemy of humanity. And that he did not want at any price.

Now he had to prove himself. The trouble was that the struggle had shifted its form. The Resistance was one thing, politics another. And Henri had no great passion for politics. He knew what a movement such as Dubreuilh had in mind would mean: committees, conferences, congresses, meetings, talk, and still more talk. And it meant endless manoeuvring, patching up of differences, accepting crippling compromises, lost time, infuriating concessions, sombre boredom. Nothing could be more repulsive to him. Running a newspaper, that was the kind of work he enjoyed. But, of course, one thing did not preclude the other, and as a matter of fact they even complemented each other. It was impossible to use his paper as an excuse. Henri did not feel he had the right to look for an out; he would only try to limit his commitments.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I can’t refuse you my name. I’ll put in a few appearances, too. But you mustn’t ask much more of me.’

‘I’ll certainly ask more of you than that,’ Dubreuilh replied.

‘Well, at any rate, not straight away. From now until I leave, I’ll be up to my ears in work.’

Dubreuilh looked Henri straight in the eyes. ‘The trip still on?’ he asked.

‘More than ever. Three weeks from now, at the latest, I’ll be gone.’

‘You’re not serious!’ Dubreuilh said angrily.

‘Now I’ve heard everything!’ Anne exclaimed, giving Dubreuilh a bantering look. ‘If you suddenly got an urge to go somewhere, you’d just pick yourself up and go, and you’d tell people it’s the only intelligent thing to do.’

‘But I don’t get those urges,’ Dubreuilh replied, ‘and that’s precisely wherein my superiority lies.’

‘I must say that the pleasures of travelling seem to me pretty much overrated,’ Paula said. She smiled at Anne. ‘A rose you bring me gives me more pleasure than the gardens of the Alhambra after a fifteen-hour train journey.’

‘Travel can be exciting enough,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘But just now it’s much more exciting being here.’

‘Well, as for me,’ Henri said, ‘I’ve got so strong an urge to be somewhere else that I’d go by foot if I had to. And with my shoes full of pebbles!’

‘And what about L’Espoir? You’ll just take off and leave it to itself for a whole month?’

‘Luc will get along quite well without me,’ Henri replied.

He looked at the three of them in amazement. ‘They don’t understand,’ he said to himself. ‘Always the same faces, the same surroundings, the same conversations, the same problems. The more it changes, the more it repeats itself. In the end, you feel as if you’re dying alive.’ Friendship, the great traditional emotions – he had valued them all for what they were worth. But now he needed something else, and the need was so violent that it would have been ridiculous even to attempt an explanation.

‘Merry Christmas!’

The door opened. Vincent, Lambert, Sézenac, Chancel, the whole gang from the newspaper, their cheeks pink from the cold. They had brought along bottles and records, and at the top of their voices they were singing the old refrain they had so often sung together during the feverish August days:

We’ve seen the last of the hun,

The bastards are all on the run.

Henri smiled at them cheerfully. He felt as young as they, and yet at the same time he also felt as if he had had a small hand in creating them. He joined in the chorus. Suddenly the lights went out, the punch flamed up, sparklers flared and Lambert and Vincent showered Henri with sparks. Paula lit the tiny candles on the Christmas tree.

‘Merry Christmas!’

Couples and small groups continued to arrive. They listened to Django Reinhardt’s guitar, danced, drank; everyone was laughing. Henri took Anne in his arms. In a voice filled with emotion she said, ‘It’s just like the night of the invasion; the same place, the same people.’

‘And now it’s all over.’

‘For us, it’s over,’ she corrected.

He knew what she was thinking. At that very moment Belgian villages were ablaze, the sea was foaming over the Dutch countryside. And yet here in Paris, it was a night of festivities, the first Christmas of the peace. There had to be festivities, sometimes. Because, if there weren’t, what good were victories? This was a holiday; he recognized that familiar smell of alcohol, of tobacco, of perfume and face powder, that smell of long nights. A thousand rainbow-tinted fountains danced in his memory. Before the war there had been so many nights – in the Montparnasse café where they all used to get drunk on coffee and conversation, in the old studios that smelled of still-wet oil paintings, in the little dance halls where he had held the most beautiful of all women, Paula, tightly in his arms. And always at dawn, accompanying the metallic sounds of morning, a gentle ecstatic voice inside him would whisper that the book he was writing would be good and that nothing in the world was more important.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve decided to write a light novel.’

‘You?’ Anne looked at him in amusement. ‘When do you begin?’

‘Tomorrow.’

Suddenly there was in him the urgent hurry to become again what he had once been, what he had always wanted to be – a writer. Deep inside him he knew again that uneasy joy that came with ‘I’m starting a new book.’ He would write of all those things that were just now being born again: the dawns, the long nights, the trips, happiness.

‘You’re in fine fettle tonight, aren’t you?’ Anne said.

‘I am. I feel as if I’ve just come out of a long dark tunnel. Don’t you?’

She paused a moment and then answered, ‘I don’t know. In spite of everything, there were some good moments in that tunnel.’

‘Yes, I suppose there were, at that.’

He smiled at her. She was looking pretty tonight, and he found her appealing in her severely tailored suit. If she hadn’t been an old friend – as well as Dubreuilh’s wife – he would willingly have tried his chances. He danced with Anne several times in succession and then with Claudie de Belzunce who, in plunging neckline and bedecked with the family jewels, had come slumming among the intellectual elite. Next time he danced with Jeanette Cange, then Lucie Lenoir. He knew them all too well, those women; but there would be other parties, other women.

Henri smiled at Preston who, somewhat unsteadily, was walking towards him across the room. He was the first American acquaintance Henri had come upon during the liberation of Paris in August, and they had fallen happily into each other’s arms.

‘Had to come and celebrate with you,’ Preston said.

‘Then let’s celebrate,’ said Henri.

They drank and then Preston began speaking sentimentally about New York nights. He was quite drunk and he leaned heavily on Henri’s shoulder. ‘You must come to New York,’ he said, and it sounded like a command. ‘I guarantee that you’ll be a huge success.’

‘Wonderful,’ said Henri. ‘I’ll come to New York.’

‘As soon as you get over, rent yourself a small plane,’ said Preston. ‘Best possible way to see the country.’

‘But I don’t know how to fly.’

‘Nothing to it. Easier than driving a car.’

‘Then I’ll learn to fly,’ said Henri.

Yes, decidedly, Portugal would be only a beginning. After that, there would be America, Mexico, Brazil, and maybe even Russia and China. In every place in the world Henri would drive cars again, would fly planes. The blue-grey air was great with promises; the future stretched away to infinity.

Suddenly a silence fell over the room. Henri saw with surprise that Paula was sitting down at the piano. She began to sing. It had been a very long time since that had happened. Henri tried to listen to her with an impartial ear; he had never been able to form a true opinion as to the value of that voice. Certainly it wasn’t mediocre; at times it even sounded like the echo of a bronze bell, muffled in velvet. Once again he asked himself why, exactly, she had given up singing. At the time, he had looked upon it as a sacrifice, an overpowering proof of her love for him. Later he was surprised to find that Paula continually avoided every opportunity that would have challenged her, and he had often wondered if she hadn’t used their love simply as a pretext to escape the test.

There was a burst of applause; Henri applauded with the others.

‘Her voice is still as beautiful as ever,’ Anne said quietly. ‘If she appeared in public again, I’m certain she’d be well received.’

‘Do you really think so?’ Henri asked. ‘Isn’t it a little late?’

‘Why? A few lessons …’ Anne looked hesitantly at Henri. ‘You know, I think it would do her good. You ought to encourage it.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said.

He studied Paula, who was smiling and listening to Claudie de Belzunce’s gushing compliments. No doubt about it, he thought. It would change her life. Being without anything to do was not doing her any good. And wouldn’t it just simplify things for him. And, after all, why not? Tonight everything seemed possible. Paula would become famous, she would devote herself to her career. And he would be free, would travel wherever he liked, would have brief, happy affairs here and there. Why not? He smiled and walked over to Nadine; she was standing next to the heater, gloomily chewing gum.

‘Why aren’t you dancing?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘With whom?’ she asked.

‘With me, if you like.’

She was not pretty. She looked too much like her father, and it was disturbing to see that surly face on the body of a young girl. Her eyes, like Anne’s, were blue, but so cold they seemed at once both worn-out and infantile. And yet, under her woollen dress, her body was more supple, her breasts more firm, than Henri had thought they would be.

‘This is the first time we’ve danced together,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘You dance well, you know.’

‘And that surprises you?’

‘Not particularly. But not one of these little snot-noses here knows how to dance.’

‘They hardly had the chance to learn.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘We never had a chance to do anything.’

He smiled at her. A young woman is a woman, even if she is ugly. He liked her astringent smell of eau de Cologne, of fresh linen. She danced badly, but it didn’t really matter; there were the youthful voices, the laughter, the trumpet taking the chorus, the taste of the punch, the evergreens with their flaming, sparkling blossoms reflected in the depths of the mirrors, and, behind the curtains, a pure black sky. Dubreuilh was performing a trick; he had cut a newspaper into small pieces and had just put it together again with a sweep of his hand; Lambert and Vincent were duelling with empty bottles; Anne and Lachaume were singing grand opera; trains, ships, planes were circling the earth, and they could be boarded.

‘You dance pretty well yourself,’ he said politely.

‘I dance like a cow. But I don’t give a damn; I hate dancing.’ She looked at him suspiciously. ‘Jitterbugs, jazz, those cellars that stink of tobacco and sweat, do you find that sort of thing entertaining?’

‘From time to time,’ he replied. ‘Why? What do you find entertaining?’

‘Nothing.’

She spoke the word so fiercely that he looked at her with growing curiosity. He wondered if it was pleasure or disappointment that had thrown her into so many arms. Would true passion soften the hard structures of her face? And what would Dubreuilh’s head on a pillow look like?

‘When I think that you’re going to Portugal … well, all I can say is that you have all the luck,’ she said bitterly.

‘It won’t be long before it’s easy for everyone to travel again,’ he said.

‘It won’t be long! You mean a year, two years! How did you ever manage it?’

‘The French Propaganda Service asked me to give a few lectures.’

‘Obviously no one would ever ask me to give lectures,’ she muttered. ‘How many?’

‘Five or six.’

‘And you’ll be roaming around for a month!’

‘Well,’ he said gaily, ‘old people have to have some rewards.’

‘And what if you’re young?’ Nadine asked. She heaved a loud sigh. ‘If something would only happen …’

‘What, for instance?’

‘We’ve been in this so-called revolutionary era for ages. And yet nothing ever seems to change.’

‘Well, things did change a little in August, at any rate,’ Henri replied.

‘As I remember it, in August there was a lot of talk about everything changing. And it’s just the same as ever. It’s still the ones who work the most who eat the least, and everyone goes right on thinking that’s just marvellous.’

‘No one here thinks that’s marvellous,’ Henri protested.

‘Well, anyhow, they all learn to live with it,’ Nadine said irritably. ‘Having to waste your time working is lousy enough, and then on top of it you can’t eat your fill … well, personally, I’d rather be a gangster.’

‘I agree wholeheartedly; we all agree with you,’ Henri said. ‘But wait a while; you’re in too much of a hurry.’

Nadine interrupted him. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘the virtues of waiting have been explained to me at home at great length and in great detail. But I don’t trust explanations.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Honestly, no one ever really tries to do anything.’

‘And what about you?’ Henri asked with a smile. ‘Do you ever try to do anything?’

‘Me? I’m not old enough,’ Nadine answered. ‘I’m just another butter ration.’

Henri burst out laughing. ‘Don’t get discouraged; you’ll soon be old enough. All too soon!’

‘Too soon! There are three hundred and sixty-five days in a year!’ Nadine said. ‘Count them.’ She lowered her head and thought silently for a moment. Then, abruptly, she raised her eyes. ‘Take me with you,’ she said.

‘Where?’ Henri asked.

‘To Portugal.’

He smiled. ‘That doesn’t seem too feasible.’

‘Just a little bit feasible will do fine,’ she said. Henri said nothing and Nadine continued in an insistent voice, ‘But why can’t it be done?’

‘In the first place, they wouldn’t give me two travel orders to leave the country.’

‘Oh, go on! You know everyone. Say that I’m your secretary.’ Nadine’s mouth was smiling, but her eyes were deadly serious.

‘If I took anyone,’ he said, ‘it would have to be Paula.’

‘But she doesn’t like travelling.’

‘Yes, but she’d be happy being with me.’

‘She’s seen you every single day for the last ten years, and there’s a lot more to come. One month more or less, what earthly difference could that make to her?’

Henri smiled at her. ‘I’ll bring you back some oranges,’ he said.

Nadine glowered at him, and suddenly Henri saw before him Dubreuilh’s intimidating mask. ‘I’m not eight years old any more, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘You don’t! To you I’ll always be the little brat who used to kick the logs in the fireplace.’

‘You’re completely wrong, and the proof of it is that I asked you to dance.’

‘Oh, this thing’s just a family affair. I’ll bet you’d never ask me to go out with you, though.’

He looked at her sympathetically. Here, at least, was one person who was longing for a change of air. Yes, she wanted a great many things, different things. Poor kid! It was true she had never had a chance to do anything. A bicycle tour of the suburbs: that was about the sum total of her travelling. It was certainly a rough way to spend one’s youth. And then there was that boy who had died; she seemed to have got over it quickly enough, but nevertheless it must have left a bad scar.

‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘I’m inviting you.’

‘Do you mean it?’ Nadine’s eyes shone. She was much easier to look at when her face brightened.

‘I don’t go back to the newspaper on Saturday nights. Let’s meet at the Bar Rouge at eight o’clock.’

‘And what will we do?’

‘That will be up to you.’

‘I don’t have any ideas.’

‘Well don’t worry, I’ll get one by then. Come and have a drink.’

‘I don’t drink. I wouldn’t mind another sandwich though.’

They went to the buffet. Lenoir and Julien were engaged in a heated discussion; it was chronic with them. Each reproached the other for having betrayed his youth – in the wrong way. At one time, having found the excesses of surrealism too tame, they jointly founded the ‘para-human’ movement. Lenoir had since become a professor of Sanskrit and he spent his free time writing obscure poetry. Julien, who was now a librarian, had stopped writing altogether, perhaps because he feared becoming a mature mediocrity after his precocious beginnings.

‘What do you think?’ Lenoir asked, turning to Henri. ‘We ought to take some kind of action against the collaborationist writers, shouldn’t we?’

‘I’ve stopped thinking for tonight,’ Henri answered cheerfully.

‘It’s poor strategy to keep them from being published,’ Julien said. ‘While you’re using all your strength preparing cases against them, they’ll have all the time in the world to write good books.’

A heavy hand came down on Henri’s shoulder: Scriassine.

‘Take a look at what I brought back. American whisky! I managed to slip two bottles into the country, and I can’t think of a better occasion than this to finish them off.’

‘Wonderful!’ said Henri. He filled a glass with bourbon and held it out to Nadine.

‘I don’t drink,’ she said in an offended voice, turning abruptly and walking off.

Henri raised the glass to his mouth. He had completely forgotten what bourbon tasted like; he did remember, though, that his preference used to be Scotch, but since he had also forgotten what Scotch tasted like, it made no difference to him.

‘Who wants a shot of real whisky?’

Luc came over, dragging his large, gouty feet; Lambert and Vincent followed close behind. They all filled their glasses.

‘I like a good cognac better,’ said Vincent.

‘This isn’t bad,’ Lambert said without conviction. He gave Scriassine a questioning look. ‘Do they really drink a dozen of these a day in America?’

‘They? Who are they?’ Scriassine asked. ‘There are a hundred and fifty million Americans, and, believe it or not, not all of them are like Hemingway heroes.’ His voice was harsh and disagreeable; he seldom made any effort to be friendly to people younger than himself. Deliberately, he turned to Henri. ‘I came over here tonight to have a serious talk with Dubreuilh. I’m quite worried.’