The Mandarins

‘That certainly won’t cheer her up much.’

‘All her friends have men. She looks like a leftover. Ask her; what can it cost you?’ she said with a sudden burst of vehemence. Then her voice softened, and pleadingly she added, ‘Just once.’

‘If it means that much to you,’ he said.

The blonde followed him unenthusiastically on to the dance floor. She was a silly, ordinary-looking thing; he couldn’t see why Nadine took such an interest in her. To tell the truth, Nadine’s whims were beginning to get on his nerves. When he returned to the table, he noticed she had filled two champagne glasses and was looking at them meditatively.

‘You’re nice,’ she said, looking at him tenderly. Suddenly she smiled and asked, ‘Do you get funny when you’re drunk?’

‘When I’m drunk I always think I’m very funny.’

‘And other people, what do they think?’

‘When I’m drunk, I don’t worry very much about what other people think.’

She pointed to the bottle. ‘Let’s see you get drunk.’

‘Champagne isn’t what’ll do it.’

‘How many glasses can you drink without getting drunk?’

‘Quite a few.’

‘More than three?’

‘Of course.’

She looked at him doubtfully. ‘That’s something I’d like to see! Do you mean to say you could gulp these two glasses down and it wouldn’t do anything to you?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘Let’s see you try.’

‘Why?’

‘People are always bragging; sometimes you have to call their bluff.’

‘After that, I suppose you’ll ask me to stand on my head,’ Henri said.

‘After that, you can go home and go to bed. Drink up; one after the other.’

He swallowed the contents of one of the glasses and felt a sudden shock in the pit of his stomach.

‘Now the second,’ Nadine said, handing him the other glass.

He drank it down.

He woke up stretched out on a bed, naked, alongside a naked woman who was holding him by the hair and shaking his head.

‘Who are you?’ he mumbled.

‘Nadine. Wake up, it’s late.’

He opened his eyes; the lights were on. He was in a strange room, a hotel room. Yes, he remembered the desk clerk, the stairway. Before that, he had been drinking champagne. His head ached.

‘What happened? I don’t understand.’

‘That champagne you drank was spiked with brandy,’ Nadine replied, laughing.

‘You spiked my champagne with brandy?’

‘I did. It’s a little trick I often play on the Americans when I have to get them drunk. Anyhow,’ she said, still smiling, ‘it was the only way to have you.’

He carefully touched his head. ‘I don’t remember a thing.’

‘Oh, there was nothing much to it.’

She got out of bed, took a comb from her purse, and, standing nude before a full-length mirror, began combing her hair. How youthful her body was! Had he really held that lithe, slender form, with its softly rounded shoulders and small breasts, against him? Suddenly she realized that he was studying her. ‘Don’t look at me like that!’ she said. She grabbed her slip and hastily put it on.

‘You’re very pretty!’

‘Don’t be silly!’ she said haughtily.

‘Why are you getting dressed? Come over here.’

She shook her head and Henri, suddenly worried, asked, ‘Did I do something I shouldn’t have? I was drunk, you know.’

She walked over to the bed and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You were very nice,’ she told him. ‘But I don’t like starting all over again,’ she added, walking away. ‘Not the same day, anyhow.’

It was annoying not being able to remember anything. He watched her putting on her socks and suddenly he felt uneasy, lying there naked between the sheets. ‘I’m getting up. Turn round.’

‘You want me to turn round?’

‘Please.’

She stood in a corner, her nose to the wall and her hands behind her back, like a schoolgirl being punished. In a moment, she asked mockingly, ‘Time enough?’

‘Ready,’ he answered, buckling his belt.

Nadine looked at him critically. ‘You are complicated!’

‘Me?’

‘You make quite a fuss about getting into bed and about getting out of it.’

‘What a head you’ve given me!’ Henri said.

They left the hotel, walked towards the Gare Montparnasse, and went into a little café which was just opening up for the morning. They sat down at a table and ordered two ersatz coffees.

‘I’d like to know why you were so set on sleeping with me,’ he said lightly.

‘I wanted to get to know you.’

‘Is that always the way you get to know people?’

‘When you sleep with someone, it breaks the ice. It’s better being together now, isn’t it?’

‘The ice is certainly broken,’ Henri said, laughing. ‘But why is it so important for you to know me?’

‘I want you to like me.’

‘But I do like you.’

She gave him a look that was both malicious and embarrassed. ‘I want you to like me enough to take me to Portugal with you.’

‘Oh, so that’s it!’ He put his hand on her arm. ‘I’ve already told you it’s impossible.’

‘Because of Paula? But since she’s not going with you anyhow, there’s no reason why I can’t.’

‘No, you just can’t. It would make her very unhappy.’

‘Don’t tell her.’

‘That would be too big a lie.’ He smiled and added, ‘Besides she’d know about it anyhow.’

‘So just to spare her a little pain, you’d deprive me of something I want more than anything in the world.’

‘Do you really want to go that much?’

‘A country where there’s sun and plenty to eat? I’d sell my soul to go.’

‘You were hungry during the war?’

‘Hungry? And bear in mind that when it came to scrounging for food, no one could beat Mother. She’d ride her bike fifty miles out into the country just to bring us back a couple of pounds of mushrooms or a chunk of meat. But that still didn’t keep us from being hungry. I literally went mad over the first American who plunked his rations in my arms.’

‘Is that what made you like Americans so much?’

‘That, and at first they used to amuse me.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Now, they’re too well organized; it’s not fun any more. Paris has become sinister again.’ She gave Henri an imploring look. ‘Take me with you.’

He would have enjoyed giving her that pleasure; nothing could be more gratifying than to make someone truly happy. But how could he ever convince Paula to accept a thing like that?

‘You’ve had affairs before,’ Nadine said, ‘and Paula put up with them.’

‘Who told you that?’

Nadine smiled slyly. ‘When a woman talks about her love affairs to another woman, it gets about pretty fast.’

Yes, Henri had admitted to a few infidelities, for which Paula had magnanimously forgiven him. But the difficulty now was that an explanation would inexorably lead him either to an entanglement of lies – and he wanted no more lies – or to abruptly demanding his freedom. And he had no stomach for that.

‘But going away together for a whole month,’ he murmured, ‘is something else again.’

‘But we’ll leave each other as soon as we get back. I don’t want to take you away from Paula,’ Nadine said with an insolent laugh. ‘All I want to do is get away from here for a while.’

Henri hesitated. To wander through strange streets and sit in outdoor cafés with a woman who laughed in your face, to find her warm, young body in a hotel room at night, yes, it was tempting. And since he had already decided to break off with Paula, what did he gain by waiting? Time would never patch things up; just the opposite.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I can’t promise you anything. Just remember, this isn’t a promise. But I’m going to try talking to Paula, and if it seems possible to take you, well … I will.’

II

I looked at the little sketch, and I was discouraged. Two months earlier I had said to the child, ‘Draw a house,’ and he had drawn a cottage with a roof, a chimney, smoke; but not a window, not a door, and surrounding the house was a tall black fence with pointed bars. ‘Now, draw a family,’ and he had drawn a man holding a little boy by the hand. And today again he had sketched a house without a door, surrounded by pointed black bars. We were getting nowhere. Was it a particularly difficult case, or was it I who didn’t know how to handle it? I put the drawing into his file. Didn’t I know how? Or didn’t I want to? Perhaps the child’s resistance merely reflected the resistance I felt in myself. It horrified me to have to drive that stranger, who had died two years earlier at Dachau, from his son’s heart. ‘If that’s the way it is, I ought to give up the case,’ I said to myself, standing silently beside my desk. I had two full hours ahead of me which I could have used to sort and file my notes, but I couldn’t make up my mind to get down to it. It’s true I’ve always been the kind to ask myself a lot of questions. Why does healing so often mean mutilating? What value does personal adjustment have in an unjust society? But nevertheless, it has always fascinated me to devise solutions for each new case. My objective isn’t to give my patients a false feeling of inner peace; if I seek to deliver them from their personal nightmares, it’s only to make them better able to face the real problems of life. And each time I succeeded, I felt I had accomplished something useful. The task is huge, it requires everyone’s co-operation. That’s what I thought yesterday. But it’s all based on the premise that every intelligent being has a part to play in a history that is steadily leading the world towards happiness. Today I no longer believe in that beautiful harmony. The future escapes us; it will shape itself without us. Well then, if we have to be content with the present, what difference does it make whether little Ferdinand once more becomes carefree and happy like other children? ‘I shouldn’t be thinking such things,’ I told myself. ‘If I go on like this, it won’t be long before I’ll have to close up my office.’ I went into the bathroom and brought back a bowl of water and an armful of old newspapers. In the fireplace, balls of paper were burning dully; I knelt down, moistened the printed sheets, and began crumpling them up. This sort of task was less distasteful to me than it used to be; with Nadine’s help and an occasional hand from the concierge’s wife, I kept the apartment in fairly good shape. At least while I was crumpling those old newspapers, I knew that I was doing something useful. The trouble was that it kept only my hands busy. I did succeed in driving little Ferdinand, as well as all thoughts of my profession, from my mind. But I gained little by it – once more the record began turning insistently in my head: There aren’t enough coffins left in Stavelot to bury all the children murdered by the SS. We had escaped; but elsewhere it had happened. They had hastily hidden the flags, buried their guns; the men had fled into the fields the women had barricaded themselves behind their doors. And in the streets abandoned to the rain, the sound of their raucous voices could be heard. This time they hadn’t come as magnanimous conquerors; they had returned with hate and death in their hearts. And then they went off again, leaving nothing behind of the festive village but burned-out houses and heaps of little bodies.

A sudden gust of cold air made me shiver; Nadine had opened the door.

‘Why didn’t you ask me to help you?’

‘I thought you were getting dressed.’

‘I finished dressing long ago,’ she said. She knelt beside me and grabbed a newspaper. ‘Are you afraid I don’t know how to do this? Don’t worry; it’s not beyond me.’

The fact is that she really wasn’t very good at it; she wet the paper too much, didn’t wad it enough. But nevertheless I should have asked her to help. I examined her critically. ‘Let me dress you up a little,’ I said.

‘For whom? Lambert?’

I took a shawl and an antique brooch from my dresser and put them on her. Then I handed her a pair of pumps with leather soles, a present from a patient who believed herself cured.

Nadine hesitated. ‘But you’re going out tonight, too. What are you going to wear?’

‘No one ever looks at my feet,’ I said laughing.

She took the shoes and grumbled, ‘Thanks.’ I almost answered, ‘You’re welcome,’ as one would to a stranger. My attentions, my generosity made her feel uncomfortable, for she wasn’t really grateful and she reproached herself for not being so. I felt her wavering between gratitude and suspicion as she awkwardly crumpled the newspaper. And after all, she was right in distrusting me; my devotion, my generosity were the most unfair of my wiles: I was seeking to escape remorse at the expense of making her feel guilty. Remorse because Diego was dead, because Nadine didn’t have any pretty dresses, because sullenness made her ugly; remorse because I didn’t know how to make her obey me and because I didn’t love her enough. It would have been more honest of me not to smother her with kindness. Perhaps I might have been able to comfort her if I simply took her in my arms and said, ‘My poor little daughter, forgive me for not loving you more.’ If I had held her in my arms, perhaps it would have protected me against those little bodies which had gone unburied.

Nadine raised her head. ‘Have you spoken to Father again about that secretarial job?’

‘No, not since the day before yesterday,’ I answered, hastily adding: ‘The magazine doesn’t come out until April. There’s still plenty of time.’

‘But I want to know now,’ Nadine said, throwing a ball of paper into the fire. ‘I really don’t understand why he’s against it.’

‘He told you; he thinks you’d be wasting your time.’ A job, adult responsibilities – I personally thought it would be good for Nadine. But Robert had more ambitious plans for her.

‘And chemistry, don’t you think I’m wasting time with that?’ she said, shrugging her shoulders.

‘No one’s forcing you to study chemistry.’

Nadine had chosen chemistry for the sole purpose of upsetting us; she succeeded only in punishing herself.

‘It isn’t so much chemistry that bores the hell out of me,’ she said. ‘It’s just being a student. Father doesn’t seem to realize it, but I’m much older than you were when you were my age. I want to so something real.’

‘I agree with you,’ I replied. ‘You know that. But just be patient. If your father sees you’re not going to change your mind he’ll end up by saying yes.’

‘He may say yes, but you can bet he’ll say it grudgingly,’ Nadine replied sulkily.

‘We’ll convince him,’ I said. ‘Do you know what I’d do if I were you? I’d learn to type at once.’

‘I can’t start now,’ Nadine replied. She paused, gave me a rather defiant look, and added, ‘Henri is taking me to Portugal with him.’

I was taken by surprise. ‘Did you decide that yesterday?’ I asked in a voice which didn’t hide my disapproval.

‘My decision was made a long time ago,’ Nadine said. Aggressively she added, ‘Naturally, you disapprove, don’t you? You disapprove because of Paula. Isn’t that right?’

I rolled one of the moist paper balls between the palms of my hands. ‘I think you’re going to make yourself very unhappy.’

‘That’s my business.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose it is.’

I tried to force myself to hold my tongue. I knew my silence annoyed her, but she provokes me when, in that biting voice of hers, she spurns the very explanations she is anxious to hear. She wants me to force her hand, but I do not like to play her game. Nevertheless, I gave it a try. ‘Henri doesn’t love you,’ I said. ‘He’s in no mood just now to fall in love.’

‘But Lambert, Lambert would be a dumb enough idiot to marry me, is that it?’ she said angrily.

‘I’ve never tried to push you into marriage,’ I answered. ‘But the fact of the matter is that Lambert does love you.’

‘That’s not true,’ she said, interrupting me. ‘He doesn’t love me. Not only has he never asked me to sleep with him, but the other night at the party, when I practically came right out and asked him, he turned me down flat.’

‘That’s because he wants other things from you.’

‘If I don’t appeal to him, that’s his business. Besides, I can understand someone being difficult to please after having had a girl like Rosa. Believe me when I tell you I try to make allowances for that. Just don’t keep telling me he’s so completely gone on me,’ Nadine said, her voice rising.

‘Do whatever you like!’ I said. ‘You’re free to do as you please. What more can you ask for?’

She cleared her throat, as she always did when she was nervous. ‘As far as Henri and myself is concerned, it’s only a matter of a little adventure. As soon as we get back, we stop seeing each other.’

‘Honestly, Nadine, do you believe that?’

‘Yes, I do believe it,’ she said with too much conviction.

‘After you’ve spent a month with Henri you’ll want to hold on to him.’

‘You’re wrong.’ Again a look of defiance appeared in her eyes. ‘If you want to know, I slept with him last night and it did absolutely nothing to me.’

I turned my eyes away; I would rather not have known about it. ‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ I said, trying not to reveal my embarrassment. ‘I’m sure that when you get back you won’t want to leave him – and he’ll have other ideas about it.’

‘That remains to be seen,’ she said.

‘Ah! So you admit it; you are hoping to hold him. But you’re only deceiving yourself, you know. All he wants at the moment is his freedom.’

‘There’s a game to be played. I enjoy it.’

‘Calculating, manoeuvring, watching, waiting – is that the kind of thing you enjoy? And you don’t even love him!’

‘I may not love him,’ she said, ‘but I want him.’ She threw a handful of paper balls into the fireplace. ‘With him at least I’ll live. Can’t you understand that?’

‘To live, you need no one but yourself,’ I said angrily.

She looked around the room. ‘Do you call this living? Frankly, my poor mother, do you believe you ever lived? What an existence! Talking to Father half the day and treating crackpots the other half.’ She stood up and brushed off her knees. ‘I do foolish things sometimes,’ she continued in an exasperated tone of voice, ‘I don’t deny it. But I’d rather end my days in a whorehouse than go through life wearing immaculate kid gloves like a good little bourgeoise. You never take off these gloves of yours, do you? You spend your time giving people advice, but what do you know about men? And I’m damned certain you never look at yourself in the mirror and never have nightmares.’

Attacking me was the tactic she always employed when she felt guilty or had doubts about herself. When she saw I didn’t intend to answer, she walked towards the door, stopped, hesitated a moment, and then turned around and asked in a calmer voice, ‘Will you come and have tea with us?’

‘Just call me whenever you’re ready.’

I stood up. I lit a cigarette. What could I do? I didn’t dare do anything. When Nadine first began seeking and fleeing Diego in bed after bed, I tried to do something about it. But she had discovered unhappiness too brutally; it had left her too bewildered with revolt and despair for anyone to exercise any control over her. When I tried to talk to her, she stopped her ears, she cried, she ran away. She didn’t return to the flat until the next morning. Robert, at my request, tried to reason with her. That evening, she didn’t go out to meet her American captain; she stayed at home alone in her room. But the next day she disappeared, leaving a note which said, ‘I am leaving.’ Robert searched for her all that night, all the next day, and all of another night, while I waited at home. The waiting was agonizing. At four o’clock in the morning a bartender in one of the Montparnasse cafés telephoned. I found Nadine, dead drunk and with a black eye, stretched out on a seat on one of the booths of the bar. ‘Let her have her freedom. It will only be worse if we try to restrain her,’ Robert said to me. I had no choice. If I had continued to fight her, Nadine would have begun to hate me and would purposely have defied me. But she knows I disapprove of her conduct and that I gave in against my will. She knows and she holds it against me. And maybe she’s not entirely wrong. Had I loved her more, our relationship might have been different. Perhaps I would have known how to stop her from leading a life of which I disapprove. For a long while I stood there looking at the flames, repeating to myself, ‘I don’t love her enough.’

I hadn’t wanted her; it was Robert who wanted to have a child right away. I’ve always held it against Nadine that she upset my life alone with Robert. I loved Robert too much and I wasn’t interested enough in myself to be moved by the discovery of his features or mine on the face of that little intruder. Without feeling any particular affection, I took notice of her blue eyes, her hair, her nose. I scolded her as little as possible, but she was well aware of my reticence; to her, I’ve always been suspect. No little girl has ever fought more tenaciously to triumph over her rival for her father’s heart. And she’s never resigned herself to belonging to the same species as I. When I told her she would soon begin menstruating and explained the meaning of it to her, she listened attentively, but with a fierce trapped look in her eyes. Then she violently threw her favourite vase to the floor, shattering it to bits. After her first period, her anger was so powerful that she didn’t bleed again for another eighteen months.

Diego had created a new climate between us; at last she owned a treasure which belonged to her alone. She felt herself my equal, and a friendship was born between us. But afterwards, everything grew even worse. Just now, everything is worse.

‘Mother.’

Nadine was calling me. As I walked down the corridor, I thought to myself, ‘If I stay too long, she’ll say I monopolise her friends; but if I leave too soon, she’ll think I’m insulting them.’ I opened the door. In the room were Lambert, Sézenac, Vincent, and Lachaume. There were no women; Nadine had no girl friends. They were sitting around the electric heater, drinking ersatz coffee. Nadine handed me a cup of black, bitter water.

‘Chancel was killed,’ she said abruptly.

I hadn’t known Chancel very well, but ten days earlier I had seen him laughing with the others around the Christmas tree. Maybe Robert was right; the distance between the living and the dead really isn’t very great. And yet, like myself, those future corpses who were drinking their coffee in silence appeared ashamed to be so alive. Sézenac’s eyes were even more blank than usual; he looked like a Rimbaud without brains.

‘How did it happen?’ I asked.

‘Nobody knows,’ Sézenac replied. ‘His brother got a note saying he died on the field of honour.’

‘Do you think there’s any chance he did it on purpose?’

Sézenac shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe.’

‘And maybe no one asked him for his advice,’ Vincent said. ‘They’re far from stingy with human material, our generals. They’re great and generous lords, you know.’ In his sallow face, his bloodshot eyes looked like two gashes; his mouth was a thin scar. One failed to notice at first that his features were actually fine and regular.

Lachaume’s face, on the other hand, was at once calm and tormented, like a craggy rock. ‘It’s all a question of prestige,’ Lachaume said. ‘If we still want to play at being a great power, we must have a respectable number of dead.’

‘Besides,’ Vincent said, ‘disarming the members of the Resistance was a neat trick. But let’s face it. If they could be quietly liquidated, that’d suit the great lords even better,’ Vincent added, his scar opening into a sort of smile.

‘What are you trying to insinuate?’ Lambert asked severely, looking Vincent straight in the eyes. ‘De Gaulle ordered de Lattre to get rid of all the Communists? If that’s what you want to say, say it. At least have that much courage.’