The Mandarins

‘No need for any order,’ Vincent replied. ‘They understand each other well enough without exchanging words.’

Lambert shrugged his shoulders. ‘You don’t believe that yourself.’

‘Maybe it’s true,’ Nadine said aggressively.

‘Don’t be silly. Of course it’s not true.’

‘What’s there to prove it isn’t?’ she asked.

‘Ah, ha! So you’ve finally picked up the technique!’ Lambert said. ‘You make up a fact out of whole cloth, and then you ask someone to prove it’s false! Obviously I can’t swear to the fact that Chancel wasn’t killed by a bullet in the back.’

Lauchaume smiled. ‘That’s not what Vincent said.’

That was the way it always went. Sézenac would hold his tongue, Vincent and Lambert would engage in a squabble, and then at the right moment Lachaume would intervene. Usually, he would chide Vincent for his leftist views and Lambert for his petit-bourgeois prejudices. Nadine would side with one camp or the other, depending upon her mood. I avoided getting entangled in their argument; it was more vehement today than usually, probably because Chancel’s death had more or less unnerved them. In any case, Vincent and Lambert weren’t made to get along with each other. Lambert had an aura of gentlemanliness about him, while Vincent, with his fur-collared jacket and his thin unhealthy face, looked rather like a hoodlum. There was a disturbing coldness in his eyes, but nevertheless I couldn’t bring myself to believe that he had killed real men with a real revolver. Every time I saw him I thought of it, but I could never actually bring myself to believe it. As for Lauchaume, he, too, may have killed, but if he did, he hadn’t told anyone and it hadn’t left any visible mark.

Lambert turned towards me. ‘You can’t even have a talk with friends any more,’ he said. ‘It’s no fun living in Paris, the way it is now. Sometimes I wonder if Chancel wasn’t right. I don’t mean getting yourself shot up, but going off and doing some fighting.’

Nadine gave him an angry look. ‘But you’re hardly ever in Paris as it is!’

‘I’m here enough to find it a lot too grim for my taste. And even when I’m at the front, believe me, I don’t feel especially proud of what I’m doing.’

‘But you did everything you could to become a war correspondent,’ she said bitterly.

‘I liked it better than staying back here, but it’s still a half measure.’

‘If you’re fed up with Paris, no one’s holding you here,’ Nadine said, her face twisted with rage. ‘Go on and play the hero.’

‘It’s no better and no worse than some other games I know of,’ Lambert grumbled, giving her a look heavy with meaning.

Nadine eyed him up and down for a moment. ‘You know, you wouldn’t look bad as a stretcher case, with bandages all over you.’ Sneringly, she added, ‘Only don’t count on me to come visiting you in the hospital. Two weeks from now I’ll be in Portugal.’

‘Portugal?’

‘Perron is taking me along as his secretary,’ she replied casually.

‘Well, well! Isn’t he the lucky one,’ Lambert said. ‘He’ll have you all to himself for a whole month!’

‘I’m not as repulsive to everyone as I am to you,’ Nadine retorted.

‘Yes, nowadays men are easy,’ Lambert muttered between his teeth. ‘As easy as women.’

‘You’re a boor!’ Nadine shouted.

Irritably, I wondered how they could let themselves be carried away by their childish manoeuvres. I felt certain they could have helped each other to live again; together they could have succeeded in conquering those memories that both united and separated them. But perhaps that was precisely why they tore each other apart: each saw his own faithlessness in the other, and they hated themselves for it. In any event, interfering would have been the worst possible blunder. I let them continue their squabble and quietly left the room. Sézenac followed me into the hall.

‘May I have a word with you?’ he asked.

‘Go ahead.’

‘There’s a favour,’ he said, ‘a favour I’d like to ask of you.’

I remember how impressive he looked on the twenty-fifth of August, with his full beard, his rifle, his red sash – a true soldier of 1848. Now his blue eyes were dead, his face puffy; when I shook his hand, I had noticed that his palm was moist.

‘I haven’t been sleeping well,’ he said haltingly. ‘I have … I have pains. A friend of mine once gave me an opium suppository and it helped a lot. Only the pharmacists won’t sell it without a prescription …’ He looked at me pleadingly.

‘What kind of pains?’

‘Oh, everywhere. In my head. And worst of all I have nightmares …’

‘You can’t cure nightmares with opium.’

His forehead, like his hands, grew moist. ‘I’ll be honest with you. I have a girl friend, a girl I like a lot. In fact, I’m thinking of marrying her. But I … I can’t do anything with her without taking opiates.’

‘Opium is a narcotic, you know. Do you use it often?’ I asked.

He pretended to be shocked by my question. ‘Oh, no! Only once in a while, when I spend the night with Lucie.’

‘Well, that’s not too bad then. You know it’s very easy to become addicted to those things.’

He looked at me pleadingly, sweat beading his brow.

‘Come see me tomorrow morning,’ I said. ‘I’ll see if I can give you that prescription.’

I went back to my room. He was obviously pretty much an addict already. When had he begun drugging himself? Why? I sighed. Another one I could stretch out on the couch and try to empty. At times, they got on my nerves, all those recliners. Outside, in the world, standing on their own two feet, they did the best they could to play at being adults. But here, in my office, they again became infants with dirty behinds, and it was up to me to wash their childhood away. And yet I spoke to them in an impersonal voice, the voice of reason, of health. Their real lives were elsewhere; mine too. It wasn’t surprising that I was tired of them – and of myself.

I was tired. ‘Immaculate kid gloves,’ Nadine had said. ‘Distant, intimidating,’ were Scriassine’s words. Is that how I appear to them? Is that how I am? I recalled my childhood rages, the pounding of my adolescent heart, the feverish days of that month of August. But all that was now of the past. The fact is that nothing was stirring inside me any more. I combed my hair and touched up my make-up. You can’t go on living indefinitely in fear; it’s too tiring. Robert had begun a new book, and he was in high spirits. I no longer awakened at night in a cold sweat. Nevertheless, I was depressed. I could see no reason for being sad. It’s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy; I must have been badly spoiled. I took my purse and gloves and knocked at Robert’s door. I hadn’t the least desire to go out.

‘Aren’t you cold?’ I asked. ‘Wouldn’t you like me to build a little fire?’

He pushed back his chair and smiled at me. ‘I’m fine,’ he said.

Naturally. Robert always felt fine. For two years, he happily sustained himself on sauerkraut and rutabagas. He was never cold; it seemed almost as if he produced his own warmth, like a yogi. When I return around midnight, he’ll still be writing, wrapped in his plaid blanket. And he’ll be surprised: ‘What time is it, anyhow?’ Up to now, he had spoken to me only vaguely of his new book, but I gathered he was satisfied with the way it was going. I sat down.

‘Nadine just told me something pretty surprising,’ I said. ‘She’s going to Portugal with Perron.’

He looked up at me quickly. ‘Does it upset you?’

‘Yes. Perron isn’t the kind of person you pick up and drop as you please. She’s going to become much too attached to him.’

Robert placed his hand on mine. ‘Don’t worry about Nadine. First of all, I’d be very surprised if she became attached to Perron. But in any case, it won’t take her long to console herself if she does.’

‘I hope she isn’t going to spend her whole life consoling herself!’ I said.

Robert laughed. ‘There you go again! You’re always shocked when you think of your daughter sleeping around, like a boy. I did exactly the same thing at her age.’

Robert refused to face the fact that Nadine wasn’t a boy. ‘It’s different,’ I said. ‘The reason Nadine grabs one man after another is that she doesn’t feel she’s alive when she’s alone. That’s what worries me.’

‘Listen, we know why she hates to be alone. She can still see Diego too clearly.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s not only because of Diego.’

‘I know. You think it’s partially our fault,’ he said sceptically. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘she’ll change; she has lots of time to change.’

‘Let’s hope so.’ I looked at Robert pleadingly. ‘It’s very important to her to have something to do that really interests her. Give her that secretarial job. She spoke to me about it again just now. She wants it badly.’

‘It’s not very exciting,’ Robert said. ‘Typing envelopes and filing all day long. It’s a crime to waste her intelligence on a thing like that.’

‘But she’ll feel she’s being useful; it will give her confidence,’ I said.

‘She could do so much better! She could continue to study.’

‘Just now what she needs is to do something. And she’d make a good secretary.’ I paused a moment and then added, ‘You mustn’t ask too much of people.’

For me, Robert’s demands had always been a stimulant, but they only succeeded in discouraging Nadine. He gave her no orders; rather, he confided in her, expected things of her, and she played along with him. She had read too many heavy books when she was too young; she had been too precociously part of adult conversations. And so, after a while, she tired of that severe routine. At first, she was disappointed in herself, and now she seemed to enjoy avenging herself by disappointing Robert.

He looked perplexed, as he always did whenever he detected a note of reproach in my voice.

‘If you really believe that’s what she wants … Well, you know best.’

‘I do believe it,’ I said.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Consider it done.’

He had given in too easily. That proved that Nadine had succeeded only too well in disappointing him. When he can no longer give himself without reserve to something that means much to him, Robert wastes no time in losing all interest in it.

‘Of course, a job that would make her completely independent of us would be even better,’ I said.

‘But that isn’t what she really wants; she simply wants to play at being independent,’ Robert said sharply. He no longer felt like speaking of Nadine, and I was unable to kindle his enthusiasm for a project of which he disapproved. I let it drop.

‘I really can’t understand Perron going on that trip,’ he said in a livelier tone.

‘He wants a holiday,’ I replied. ‘After all,’ I added spiritedly, ‘he has the right to enjoy himself a little. He certainly did enough …’

‘He did more than I did,’ Robert said. ‘But that’s not the question.’ He looked at me intently. ‘In order for the SRL to get going, we’ve got to have a newspaper.’

‘I know,’ I said. Then I added hesitantly. ‘I wonder …’

‘What?’

‘If Henri will ever turn his paper over to you. It means so much to him.’

‘It isn’t a question of his turning it over to us,’ Robert replied.

‘But it is a question of his submitting to the orders of the SRL.’

‘He’s already a member. And it would certainly be to his advantage to adopt a clearly defined programme; a newspaper without a political programme just doesn’t make sense.’

‘But that’s their idea.’

‘You call that an idea?’ Robert said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘To perpetuate the spirit of the Resistance without taking sides! That sort of jargon is fine for some idiot like Luc. The spirit of the Resistance! It makes me think of the spirit of Locarno. But I’m not worried; Perron isn’t the kind to go in for spiritualism. He’ll end up by going along with us. But meanwhile we’re losing valuable time.’

I was afraid Robert was due for quite a surprise. When he’s deeply involved in a project, he thinks of people as mere tools. But Henri had given himself body and soul to that paper; it was his personal achievement and he wasn’t going to be casual about letting anyone dictate policy to him.

‘Why haven’t you spoken to him about it yet?’ I asked.

‘All Henri has on his mind these days is that trip of his.’

Robert looked so unhappy that I suggested, ‘Try to make him stay.’

For Nadine’s sake, it would have made me happy to see him give up the trip. But I’d have felt sorry for Henri; he was counting on it so much.

‘You know how he is,’ Robert said. ‘When he’s stubborn, he’s stubborn. I’d better wait until he gets back.’ He drew the blanket over his knees. ‘I’m not saying this to chase you out,’ he added cheerfully, ‘but usually you hate to be late …’

I got up. ‘You’re right; I should leave now. Are you sure you don’t want to come?’

‘Oh, no! I haven’t the least desire to talk politics with Scriassine. Maybe he’ll spare you, though.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ I said.

During those long periods when Robert shut himself in with his work, I often went out without him. But that evening, as I hurried into the cold, into the dark, I was sorry that I had accepted Scriassine’s invitation. I understood perfectly well why I hadn’t declined: I knew my friends much too well and I was tired of always seeing the same faces. For four years we had lived side by side; it kept one warm. But now, our intimacy had grown cold. It smelled musty and it benefited no one. I had reacted to the appeal of something new. But what would we find to say to each other? Like Robert, I didn’t feel like talking politics.

I stopped in the lobby of the Ritz and looked at myself in a mirror. What with clothes rationing, to be well dressed took a lot of doing. I had chosen not to bother myself about it at all. In my threadbare coat and wooden-soled shoes, I didn’t look very exciting. My friends accepted me as I was, but Scriassine had just come from America where the women always seem to be so well groomed. He would surely notice my shoes. ‘I shouldn’t have let myself go like this,’ I thought.

Naturally, Scriassine’s smile didn’t betray him. He kissed my hand, something I hate. A hand is even more naked than a face; it embarrasses me when someone looks at it too closely.

‘What will you have?’ he asked. ‘A martini?’

‘A martini will do.’

The was bar filled with American officers and well-dressed women. The heat, the smell of cigarettes, and the strong taste of the gin went to my head immediately, and I was glad to be there. Scriassine had spent four years in America, the great liberating nation, the nation in which fountains spout streams of fruit juices and ice cream. I questioned him avidly and he patiently answered all my questions. We had a second round of martinis and then we had dinner in a little restaurant where I gorged myself without restraint on rare roast beef and cream puffs. Scriassine, in turn, interrogated me; it was difficult to answer his too-precise questions. If I tried to recapture the taste of my daily existence – the smell of cabbage soup in the curfew-barricaded house, the ache in my heart whenever Robert was late in returning from a clandestine meeting – he would sharply interrupt me. He was a very good listener; he made you feel as if he were carefully weighing each of your words. But you had to speak for him, not for yourself. He wanted practical information: how did we go about making up false papers, printing L’Espoir, distributing it? And he also asked me to paint vast frescoes for him: What was the moral climate in which we had lived? I tried my best to satisfy him, but I’m afraid I didn’t succeed very well; everything had been either worse or more bearable than he imagined. The real tragedies hadn’t happened to me, and yet they haunted my life. How could I speak to him of Diego’s death? The words were too sad for my mouth, too dry for Diego’s memory. I wouldn’t have wanted to relive those past four years for anything in the world. And yet from a distance they seemed to take on a sombre sweetness. I could easily understand why Lambert was bored with this peace which gave us back our lives without giving us back our reasons for living. When we left the restaurant and stepped out into the pitch-black cold, I remembered how proudly we used to face the nights. Now, I longed for light warmth; I, too, wanted something else. Without provocation, Scriassine plunged into a long diatribe; I wished he would change the subject. He was furiously upbraiding de Gaulle for his trip to Moscow. ‘The thing that’s really serious,’ he said to me accusingly, ‘is that the whole country seems to approve of it. Look at Perron and Dubreuilh, honest men both, walking hand in hand with the Communists. It’s heartbreaking for someone who knows.’

‘But Robert isn’t with the Communists,’ I said, attempting to calm him down. ‘He’s trying to create an independent movement.’

‘Yes, I know; he spoke to me about it. But he made it perfectly clear that he doesn’t intend working against the Stalinists. Beside them, but not against them!’ Scriassine said crushingly.

‘You really wouldn’t want him to be anti-Communist, would you?’ I asked.

Scriassine looked at me severely. ‘Did you read my book The Red Paradise?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then you must have some idea of what would happen to us if we made Stalin a present of Europe.’

‘But there’s no question of giving Europe to Stalin,’ I said.

‘That’s precisely the question.’

‘Nonsense! The question is how to win the struggle against reaction. And if the left begins to split up, we won’t have a ghost of a chance.’

‘The left!’ Scriassine said ironically. ‘Let’s not talk politics,’ he added with an abrupt gesture of finality. ‘I hate talking politics with a woman.’

‘I didn’t start it,’ I said.

‘You’re absolutely right,’ he replied with unexpected gravity. ‘Please excuse me.’

We went back to the Ritz bar and Scriassine ordered two whiskies. I liked the taste; it was something different. And as for Scriassine, he, too, had the advantage of being new to me. The whole evening had been unexpected, and it seemed to emit an ancient fragrance of youth. Long ago there had been nights that were unlike others; you would meet unknown people who would say unexpected things. And, occasionally, something would happen. So many things had happened in the last five years – to the world, to France, to Paris, to others. But not to me. Would nothing ever happen to me again?

‘It’s odd being here,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘The heat, the whisky, the noise, and those uniforms …’

Scriassine glanced around him. ‘I hate this place. They requisitioned a room for me here because I’m a reporter for a Franco-American magazine,’ he explained. ‘Fortunately, it won’t be long before it becomes too expensive for me. And then I’ll be forced to get out,’ he added with a smile.

‘Can’t you leave without being forced?’

‘No. That’s why I find money such a corrupting influence.’ A burst of laughter brightened his face. ‘As soon as I get hold of some, I can’t wait to get rid of it.’

A bald-headed little man with mild and gentle eyes stopped at our table. ‘Aren’t you Victor Scriassine?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Scriassine answered. I caught a mistrustful look in his eyes – and at the same time a gleam of hope.

‘Don’t you recognize me? Manès Goldman. I’ve aged a lot since Vienna. I promised myself that if I ever met you again I would say thank you, thank you for your book.’

‘Manès Goldman! Of course!’ Scriassine said warmly. ‘Are you living in France now?’

‘Since ’35. I spent a year in the camp at Gurs, but I got out just in time …’ His voice was even more gentle than his eyes, so gentle in fact that it seemed almost dead. ‘I don’t want to disturb you any longer; I just want to say I’m very happy to have shaken the hand of the man who wrote Vienna in Brown.’

‘Nice seeing you again,’ Scriassine said.

The little Austrian walked quietly away and went out the glass door behind an American officer. Scriassine followed him with his eyes.

‘Another defeat!’ he said abruptly.

‘A defeat?’

‘I should have asked him to sit down, should have spoken to him. He wanted something and I don’t even know his address, didn’t think to give him mine,’ Scriassine said, his voice choked with anger.

‘If he wants to see you again, he’ll surely come here.’

‘He wouldn’t dare. It was up to me to make the first move, to make him sit down and question him. And the thing that really hurts is that it would have been so easy! A year at Gurs! And I suppose he spent the other four hiding. He’s my age, and he looks like an old man. He was hoping I could do something for him. And I just let him walk away!’

‘He didn’t seem disappointed. Maybe he did only want to thank you.’

‘That was just an excuse,’ Scriassine said, emptying his glass. ‘It would have been so simple to ask him to sit down. God! when you think of all the things you could do and yet somehow never do! All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn’t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you’re closed up tight. That’s the worst sin of all – the sin of omission.’ He spoke as if I weren’t present, in an agonizing monologue of remorse. ‘And during those four years, I was in America, warm, safe, well-fed.’

‘You couldn’t have stayed here,’ I said.

‘I could have gone into hiding too.’

‘I really don’t see what good that would have done.’

‘When my friends were exiled to Siberia, I was in Vienna; when others were being slaughtered by the Brown Shirts in Vienna, I was in New York. What’s so damned important about staying alive? That’s the question that needs answering.’

I found myself moved by Scriassine’s voice. We, too, felt ashamed whenever we thought of the deportees. No, we had nothing to blame ourselves for; it was just that we hadn’t suffered enough.

‘The misfortunes you don’t actually share … well, it’s as if you were to blame for them,’ I said. ‘And it’s a horrible thing to feel guilty.’

Suddenly Scriassine smiled at me with a look of secret connivance. ‘That depends,’ he said.

For a moment I studied his crafty, tormented face. ‘Do you mean there are certain feelings of remorse that shield us from others?’

Scriassine studied me in turn. ‘You’re not so dumb, you know. Generally, I dislike intelligent women, maybe because they’re not intelligent enough. They always want to prove to themselves, and to everyone else, how terribly clever they are. So all they do is talk and never understand anything. What struck me the first time I saw you was that way you have of keeping quiet.’

I laughed. ‘I didn’t have much choice.’

‘All of us were doing a lot of talking – Dubreuilh, Perron and myself. You just stood there calmly and listened.’

‘Listening is my job,’ I said.

‘Yes, I know, but you have a certain way with you.’ He nodded his head. ‘You must be an excellent psychiatrist. If I were ten years younger, I’d put myself in your hands.’

‘Are you tempted to have yourself analysed?’

‘It’s too late now. A fully developed man who’s used his defects and blemishes to piece himself together. You can ruin him but you can’t cure him.’

‘That depends on the sickness.’

‘There’s only one sickness that really amounts to anything – being yourself, just you.’ An almost unbearable sincerity suddenly softened his face, and I was deeply touched by the confiding sadness in his voice.

‘There are people a lot sicker than you,’ I said briskly.

‘In what way?’

‘There are some people who make you wonder when you look at them, how they can possibly live with themselves. Unless they’re complete idiots, they should horrify themselves. You don’t seem like that at all.’