I once again located the young man of fifty, the intellectual with a hot line to the truth. He was now older than a couple of weeks ago and, instead of the black curls he had last time, he had chosen a sleek ash gray hairstyle, but what he was saying could have been said, word for word, by his double who had held forth about the "phantom country." He had already filled his plate and was in conversation now with a very corpulent man sporting a ponytail and dressed in black, the maker of the film that had just been screened. Sitting in a little circle of guests, the two of them unintentionally formed a variety double act, the thin one and the fat one, and their remarks corresponded to this physical difference: the thin one, the intellectual, modulated and elaborated on the fat one's deliberately crude remarks based on his "gut feelings." The fat one, the artist, was apt to begin his sentences by saying, "Personally, I don't give a damn for the official history" before going on to explain how "you have to swallow the archives raw." It was a remark from a woman that drew me toward their circle. Tall, bony, with a masculine profile (I recalled the literary journalist who had played the role of this Parisian type last time), that evening she was an official of the Ministry of Culture. "You should show your film in Moscow. They ought to know these facts as well," she said to the filmmaker with the authority of one who provides subsidies.
"In Moscow…" I was used to picking up these Russian references. But more crucial still than this reflex was the desire to see the face of the person who could have made that film. From where I was I could only see his very broad back and the ponytail dangling over his black silk shirt. I went up to them.
The film was called The Price of Delay and was black and white, for it consisted mainly of archive film from the Second World War. During the opening minutes it showed Soviet soldiers, eating, coming and going, laughing, sitting and smoking, dancing to the sound of an accordion, washing in a river. Then Stalin loomed up, tugging at his pipe, looking both jovial and cunning, and, in the tones of a verdict being delivered, the commentary declared that this man was guilty of… (here there was a pause)… slowness. The advance of his armies was much less rapid than it could and should have been. The result: thousands and thousands of deaths in the camps, which could have been liberated much sooner by this army that had moved at a snail's pace. The archive film moved on to piles of bodies, lines of barbed wire, squat buildings with their chimneys belching out black smoke. And again, without transition, one saw the soldiers with their broad laughing faces, a close-up of a smoker blowing elegant white smoke rings in the air, another of a soldier, with his fur shapka pulled well down over his eyes, sleeping under a tree. And a few images further on we again saw the living skeletons in their striped pajamas, their eyes distended with suffering, naked, emaciated bodies which no longer looked like human beings. The commentary began adding up figures: the delay accumulated by these lazy soldiers, the number of victims who could have been saved… There were several ingenious technical devices in the film. At one moment the screen was split in two. On the right-hand side the scenes were shown in slow motion, focusing on the soldiers moving at a sleepwalker's pace. And the left-hand side, with speeded-up film, showed a mass grave being rapidly filled with corpses in striped clothing. In the final sequence these two juxtaposed realities faded and the image came through of the armored vehicles and the American soldiers sweeping in, as liberators, through the gateway to a camp.
I should not have intervened. All the more because I knew how useless it would be. Or at least I should have done it differently. I talked about the front that extended well over a thousand miles between the Baltic and the Black Sea, about the forced march offensives Stalin launched to save the American troops defeated in the Ardennes, about the crude arithmetic of the numbers of soldiers who had to die in their thousands every day just to shift the front line a few miles farther west.
At this moment the fat filmmaker, deeply ensconced in his armchair, crossed his legs and knocked over the glass the woman next to him had put on the floor. He roared with laughter and apologized, the woman gave him a paper napkin with which he patted his splashed pants bottoms, and everyone stirred, as if liberated by this interlude. And it was in the tones of a cocktail party argument that he exclaimed to me, gruff and ironic, "Look, I don't give a damn for all that official history, Stalin, Zhukov, and all that claptrap. What I do is open an archive like a can of beans. I wolf it all down. And then I spit it out onto the screen, just as it stands."
He must have realized that, after having "wolfed it down," he could not then spit it out just as it stood, and quickly corrected the image in more aggressive tones: "Don't tell me you're going to come out with all that old stuff about twenty million Russians killed in the war!"
The intellectual with the ash gray hair elaborated with, "The great trump card of nationalist propaganda."
The conversation became general.
"The German-Soviet pact," interrupted the ex-minister.
"If it hadn't been for the Americans Stalin would have invaded the whole of Europe," said a woman, still young, who spoke like someone reciting a lesson.
"You know those twenty million must have included everyone who died of old age. Over four years that's quite a crowd!" wisecracked the ex-minister.
"The Katyn massacres…" chimed in the official from the culture ministry.
"Our duty to remember…" added the intellectual.
"Repentance…" intoned a man who a few minutes earlier had collided with a woman at the salad table and had made an apologetic face: exactly the same as now when speaking of repentance.
"Listen, it's very simple. In the archives I slaved over in Moscow it's as plain as the nose on your face. If the Russians hadn't dragged their feet in Poland and Germany at least half a million men could have been saved. Hold on, it can't hurt to do a bit of number crunching."
The filmmaker took a daybook out of his pocket with a cover that opened out onto a little pocket calculator. Several people leaned forward to follow his explanations better. I could hear my own voice, as if from outside myself, booming away above these bowed heads. I tried to say that, when liberating a camp the soldiers could not use artillery or assault grenades, and that often they had to go in without shooting because the Germans sheltered behind the prisoners, and that out of two hundred men in a company only a dozen were left at the end of a battle.
The ringing of a telephone buried in someone's bag interrupted these wasted words. People began patting their pockets, rummaging in their bags. In the end the filmmaker grabbed the machine out of his own jacket pocket. Cursing, he swung his body out of the armchair and moved away a few paces. Without him the conversation split up into couples and was lost in the general hubbub of the room.
I made my way through the crowd, seeking to rid myself of a feeling of nausea at having said too much. But the words I had just spoken came back to haunt me in increasingly irreparable tones: "Without artillery… With their bare hands… Human shields…" In the looks I encountered I felt I was sensing the ironic tolerance people have for what is, at the end of the day, a harmless gaffe. It struck me that I should have found it easier to make myself understood by that Wehrmacht officer barking out his orders on the square in the Brest Litovsk citadel than by these people sipping their drinks.