Among the smugglers, an old Jewish woman, very ugly, extremely unpleasant (like an anti-Semitic caricature).
She is wearing an expensive fur coat.
I speak to her as we return to the village; in principle, she could take part in a real hunt (and even have her own), but she prefers to hunt other people’s game.
I tell her she is at risk of being pursued and of seeing her name dishonored.
The rest is confused: we speak of slander, of fines.
The scandal must be kept quiet.
No. 15: May 1970
La rue de Quatrefages
P. and I are living in the building on rue de Quatrefages, at the very back of the yard, no longer on the fifth floor but on the ground floor. We are living separately, which is to say we have separated our apartment in two. After some complicated construction, we even end up sharing the apartment with our neighbor.
I am touring the apartment. The first two rooms are familiar; it’s basically our old apartment on rue de Quatrefages. Then you come to a curious part: a bizarrely furnished kitchen. There is a tiny ceramic basin (a “scullery sink”) whose faucet is open over a covered casserole pot (a “hot-dish”) larger than the sink (which can suggest only imminent overflow …); above the sink, there is an immense glass fume hood (a “sorbonne”); it’s glass but it’s barely clear, more like “bumpy” (fluted?) glass; also notable: the hood is completely detached from the wall, the length of which is lined with water and gas pipes, and actually has to be suspended from the ceiling. There is also a gas cooker with plates simmering on it.
Past the kitchen is a large bathroom with a trapezoidal bathtub. Then a hallway and, at the very end, a somewhat worm-eaten wooden door. This is how I discover, for the first time in my life, that my apartment has two doors; I vaguely suspected as much, but I (finally?) have tangible proof.
I open the door. Immediately the three cats who live in the apartment run out. There is one white cat and two grey cats, one of which is certainly my cat. No big deal, they’ll definitely be back; obviously it’s through this door, and not the other, that P. usually lets them out.
I look through the keyhole (which is round and eye-sized). I see the avenue, wide, lined with trees and a few stores, including a restaurant.
P. is asleep in the apartment. She has found only one of the cats. He was on rue Mortimer.
I realize, first of all, that the first room of the apartment belongs jointly to P. and to the neighbor, and, second, that this is not my apartment, that I have never lived here.
In the first room, the neighbor’s section and P.’s are separated by a heap of books. The neighbor, a fairly old and rather boorish woman, can no longer tell which of these books she has borrowed from P., nor which she has finished reading and wishes to return.
She hands me a very pretty book, a bit like the Hetzel editions of Jules Verne. I quiver with joy: the title of the book is
LUNGS
It’s an extremely rare book, a classic of respiratory physiology that I remember hearing G. mention. I open it. It is written in German (in Gothic characters).
I recognize, in the heap of books, many familiar volumes (the Queneau-Massin-Carelman edition of Exercises in Style, books by Steinberg, etc.).
The neighbor’s husband arrives. He is an old, tired man. He has no mustache. Or, rather, he has one. He looks a bit like the actor André Julien, or maybe like André R., the father of one of my old classmates. In his hand is a case shaped like a large ballpoint pen, which is full either of many ballpoint pens or of one enormous pen with — let’s say — twelve colors. He nods, looking displeased.
Later: I am lying on a bed, next to the pile of books. In front of me, to my left, P. is spread out on another bed, perpendicular to mine. In front of P.’s bed, across from me, there is a long table with the husband sitting behind it (just across from me) and (on my right) the neighbor, who has a tiny electric battery in front of her.
Long before, P. and I were in the street. We were wandering in a lovely park, as pretty as the Jardin des Missions Étrangères on rue de Varenne.
No. 16: July 1970
The arrest
I am in Tunis. It is a vertically sprawling city. I’m on a very long walk: winding roads, lines of trees, fences, panoramas. It’s as if the whole landscape turned out to be the background of an Italian painting.
The next day, the police come to arrest me. Long ago I committed a minor infraction. I no longer have any memory of it, but I know that today it could cost me twenty years.
I flee, armed with a revolver. The places I pass through are unfamiliar. There is no immediate danger, but I know already that my flight won’t solve anything. I go back to places I know, where I had been walking the previous night. Three sailors ask me for directions. Behind a line of trees, women in veils wash laundry.
I return to town on a winding road. There are cops everywhere, hundreds of them. They’re stopping everyone and searching vehicles.
I pass between the cops. As long as I don’t make eye contact, I have a chance of making it out.
I go into a café, where I find Marcel B. I sit down near him.
Three men enter the café (cops, obviously!); they make a halfhearted search of the room. Maybe they haven’t seen me? I almost breathe a sigh of relief, but one of them comes and sits down at my table.
“I don’t have my papers on me,” I say.
He is about to stand and leave (which would mean I’m saved), but he says to me in a low voice:
“Copulate!”
I don’t understand.
He writes the word in the margin of a newspaper, in huge bubble letters:
then he goes back over the first three letters, filling them in:
Eventually I get his drift. It’s extremely complicated: I am to go home and “have marital relations with my wife” so that, when the police come for me, the fact of “copulating” on a Sunday will constitute for me, being Jewish, an aggravating circumstance.
My being Jewish is, of course, at the root of this whole affair and complicates it considerably. My arrest is a consequence of the Judeo-Arab conflict and affirming my pro-Palestinian sentiments will do me no good.
I return to my villa (which might be just a single room). Most of all I want to know whether I will be a Tunisian prisoner in France or a French prisoner in Tunisia. Either way, I anticipate an amnesty during a visit from a head of state.
I feel innocent. What bothers me most is having to go for several years without being able to change my dirty socks.
No. 17: July 1970
The switch
“One fine morning,” I am once again in a concentration camp. It’s time to get up; the challenge is to find clothes (I am dressed in everyday attire, tweed jacket, English shoes).
In the camp, everything is for sale. I see rolls of large bills in circulation. The guardians give potions to the detainees.
Someone finds me a jacket. We line up to go down (we’re in a large dormitory on the second floor of a sort of repurposed barrack).