Stopping in a recess in front of the window, beside a piano pushed against the wall, I studied the room for a moment, the little gathering around the tables with the remains of the food, the circle I had just left, other groups. The filmmaker, whom I had not at first noticed, was seated near to me on the piano stool. He was shouting into his telephone while swinging round in little abrupt half turns that reflected the vehemence of his replies: "No, listen, I'm not a charity! It's already costing us an arm and a leg. Okay, but they should lower their commission. No, keep your hat on, I'm not holding a gun to anyone's throat… Nor to anyone's head either, I mean… You'd have to be the biggest dumbass in the world to offer them a million and a half. Yes, but it was figured in, pal. Hold on, I can tell you that right away. Provided we keep the rate that was quoted, all in all what you'll get is…"
He laid his daybook-cum-calculator on the lid of the piano and began doing his numbers and communicating the result to his interlocutor. If he had looked up he would have seen a kind of admiration in my eyes.
At that moment the memory of the soldier came back to me. Surrounded by his comrades, he paused on the brink of what must once have been a narrow river, and was now stagnant, clogged up with human ashes and corpses. After a few seconds' hesitation he walked into the yellowish liquid, the others following him, soon wading in up to their chests, and emerging covered in sticky scum. And they began running toward the rows of barbed wire, toward the watchtowers.
It now came to me that in the absurd discussion after the film I should simply have spoken about that soldier. And especially about those few minutes between the moment when he plunged into the brown porridge containing a thousand dead people in suspension and the second when, still conscious, he raised his hand to his face, half blown away by shrapnel. Yes, I should have explained that it was the sight of that water that had slowed down the soldiers' advance (oh, that Russian slowness!). Nothing could amaze them any more, not blood, not the infinite diversity of wounds, not the resistance of bodies that, though dismembered, mangled, blind, still clung to life. But this beige scum, these lives reduced to dust… The soldiers hesitated, as if on the brink of what reason could not conceive.
At that moment, in front of the almost bare table, I saw the filmmaker turning a glass upside down, no doubt to see if anyone had been drinking from it. A young woman (the one who had announced that Stalin could have invaded Europe), obliged to shout because of the noise, was speaking to him 'with her mouth close to his ear, directing a whole pantomime of gestures at his ear as if this organ could see. Beyond the swaying of heads the intellectual with the ash gray hair was holding forth, surrounded by the figures of women, and his hands were making hypnotic passes. In the circle around the ex-minister and his girl-wife they were roaring with laughter.
The idea of telling them about the soldier suddenly seemed unthinkable. No, I had simply to imagine his mute, invisible presence somewhere in this room, where the aromas of sauces and wine spilled on the carpet lingered. I should observe his gaze-first at the sequences of the film, then at these mouths, eating, tasting the wine, smiling, talking about the camps. The soldier's gaze did not judge, it focused on things and beings with a wry detachment and understood everything. It understood that the people in the room who spoke of millions of victims, of repentance, of the duty to remember, were lying. Not that the victims had not existed. The soldier still had their ashes stuck to his hands, to the folds in his tunic. But at the time of their martyrdom and their death each of them had a face, a past, that not even the serial number tattooed to their wrists had succeeded in obliterating. Now they were conveniently assembled into these anonymous millions, an army of the dead that was constantly being paraded about in the great bazaars of ideas. The soldier had no difficulty in grasping that the sinister building in the film, belching forth black smoke and producing human ashes, had become a real family business for the filmmaker and his friend. And, like good salesmen, this fat man with his pocket calculator and his thin friend with his dogmatic voice, they and their countless ubiquitous doubles uttered deafening rallying cries, hurled abuse at the indifferent, cursed the incredulous. They did not allow the millions of dead a moment's peace, reviving their torture in front of cameras, on the pages of newspapers, on screens. Every day they had to find something new. First it was the spuriously contrite face of a bishop collapsing into repentance. Next the police, like inconsolable penitents, asking forgiveness for the errors of their colleagues half a century ago. Then one day this brilliant notion! Why not accuse the soldiers who liberated the camps of being too slow? The thin men and the fat men were indefatigable in invoking the memory, but, curiously enough, the fuss they made provoked forget-fulness. For they talked about millions without faces, like those cascades of zeros that appeared on their pocket calculators.
I knew that the soldier would not have taken the trouble to deny or debate. His gaze would have been silent. He would have observed the room and would no doubt have formed a single impression that summed up everything: ugliness. Ugliness of words, ugliness of thoughts, ugliness of the shared lie. The extraordinary ugliness of that young woman's face, leaning toward the filmmaker's ear, her young body, tall and lithe, contorted with the hypocrisy of the words the man was listening to with paternal indulgence. Ugliness of all these faces and these bodies, smooth through careful grooming, rubbing shoulders in the agreeable coziness of the in-crowd. The infinite ugliness of that France.
No, the soldier would not have been thinking about all that. His silent presence would have placed him far away from these well-nourished bodies, these minds well versed in the conventional wisdom, far from the hypnotists of memory and the dealers in millions of dead. In this faraway place there was the barbed-wire entanglement on which he had fallen, transforming his own body into a bridge for those who followed him. Beyond his death, there was that instant when, in the liberated camp, the echo of the last shot fired faded away, those blurred minutes when the soldiers who had survived were roaming among the barrack huts with their gaping doors, among the bodies, disposed according to the whims of death, long minutes when they were getting used to feeling they were alive, to seeing the tranquillity of the sky, to being able to hear. In those first instants there was a wounded man, wearing the uniform of a penal company, a young soldier crumpled up against the wall of a hut, his hands pressed against his belly and filled with blood. He cried out, asking for water. But the others, still deafened by the last of the explosions, did not hear him. As the burning pain increased, it seemed to him that no one in the universe heard his cry. He was wrong. A man was coming toward him, very slowly, for he was afraid of falling. This man without flesh, without muscles, clad in striped rags, was moving like a child learning to walk and all his equilibrium was derived from an old bowl filled with water clutched in his hands. It was the water he had gathered from a drainpipe's tiny drips. Water that had already saved life. The wounded soldier saw the prisoner, saw his eyes sunk in his emaciated skull and fell silent. There was nothing more in the world, just these two pairs of eyes slowly approaching each other.
Thinking about that prisoner gave me a feeling of joy I could not explain to myself I told myself simply that his look was not recorded by any pocket calculator adding up the millions, nor inscribed in any official martyrology. No one was forcing me to recollect him but he lived in my memory, a remarkable being in all the grievous beauty of his gesture.
Threading my way toward the exit between the groups of guests, I passed the girl-wife. Through the noise I could only grasp the last part of the remark she addressed to me: "… really enthralling!"