I opened my eyes. Or perhaps they were already open, and I merely forced myself to return to the other reality, now ending its useless existence, finite, pointless reality. The low ceiling, veined with green streaks… A basin full of bandages. A gangly spider on the wall… A stocky serving woman entered, braids coiled over her ears, silver hoops knocking against her cheeks. She moved about the room, I could perceive the attention in her gaze, focused on what? The spider watched her. I wanted to call N’ga, but I could not move or speak. Why was I fretting, about what, since I had nothing more to fear or to desire? The servant was nudging my suitcase, softly, softly toward the door, the suitcase that contained my most precious things, tea, sugar, matches, cigarettes, soap, a scholarly edition of the Manifesto… “Thief! Thief! Bitch!” I screamed and the stocky woman heard nothing, I knew that my brain alone was screaming and that its scream was nothing. So then, thought and will were participants in nothingness? The revolver under the pillow — my brain was seizing it, but a brain without hands is nothing, I was a part of nothing. Before pushing the suitcase through the doorway, the servant looked shrewdly straight at me. Her little eyes were as sharp and alert as a foraging rodent’s. My anger subsided. Take the suitcase, sneaky creature, weasel woman, if you want it to winter more snugly in your den, the spider won’t tell. I turned away, toward the places of my childhood: the tall reeds where my father hid his dinghy to wait for wild duck.
Anton emerged from the ruins, clad in gold-embroidered white silk, like a Persian prince in an illuminated manuscript. His horse’s hooves gamboled so lightly over the dead city, wasn’t it a wingèd charger? Anton on a wingèd charger! I laughed. Ha, you didn’t think it was possible? Neither did I, Anton. Then I saw him differently, with his flat face, funny diamond-shaped spectacles, hospital coat, and a syringe between his fingers. N’ga was holding a flaming-red object with both hands, a captive bird — hallo, they’ve dug my heart from my chest! No, it was a flask. Anton said, “Saved in the nick of time. You’ve really put me through it, you louse. Bloody hell! Time you came around. The melodrama’s over, or d’you want my fist in your face?”
“I don’t have a face… What’s the matter? Where did you come from?”
“You’re the one coming back from a long way off, brother. I got off a plane four days ago. Have some of this iced coffee. I bring you messages from on high. You’ve got a medal, you skunk.”
“I don’t care.”
“Yes, you do. You’re behind with your work.”
I was still suspended between two realities. “Behind with my work” brought me to earth with a bump. Clever, Anton. “Tell me about Mania,” I said feebly.
“Mania has remarried for the third time since she left you. Getting uglier by the minute. A veritable camel, my brother. More coffee?”
At university, I had adored Anton. We never stopped bickering. He was inventing biological Marxism or Marxist biology or was it dialectical biology… He had no time for old-world romantics who believe in love. “The couple,” he would say, in the insufferable tone he adopted to emit verdicts beyond appeal, “is necessarily nothing but a two-bit drama determined by physio-psychological, not to say social, misunderstandings… Most women are garrulous vaginas with the brains of a sparrow… The outcome of a hundred thousand years of domestic exploitation.” A textbook case of the believer with a cynical veneer. I wonder what happened to him? Back then he was a favorite of men in high places; he must have followed them to the grave, as he foresaw. “We have built” — it was one of his sarcastic sayings — “a colossal infernal machine of stupendous perfection, and we’ve settled down for a nice snooze on top of it, wearing shiny red-paper laurel crowns on our heads. There!” Nothing left of him but this memory of mine… (There’ll be time to spare for sorting out memories. Anton lecturing about how we should only preserve useful ones: “To forge a living memory, in the service of an active present…” What use is your memory now, dear Anton?)
This unease that recalls you to me, Anton, comes from Nadine. Nadine is straight as a die, mettlesome, instinctual. She’s right, I’m wrong: instincts are always right in the end. We all construct elaborate traps for ourselves, and when we walk straight into them, we’re stunned…
Nadine lit a big fire in the fireplace and the room filled with well-being. She threw in some letters, photos, several passports. Her devastation had attained a calm of utter catastrophe. It was compounded of two disasters, one trivial, the other almost inconceivable, and it was the trivial one that caused the most pain, like an open wound. “Sacha only made up his mind at the end of the twelfth hour, because we were in Hell…” For two years now Nadine had been afraid to open a newspaper, receive a letter, speak a name, think of a person, let slip the least doubt concerning the totally absurd accusations that were universally proclaimed, to seem not to be applauding the unforgivable with all her heart and soul. Conspiracies whirled around like a witches’ sabbath… At first she’d believed in them, like everyone; then she’d willed herself to believe the unbelievable; then she’d feigned belief and, lately, she’d been smothering fits of sobbing under her pillow. Sacha, who feared being alone with her — Sacha whom she pictured all alone with his opaque tragedy — packed her off to Mont Saint-Michel, to Nice, Cannes, Antibes, Juan-les-Pins on the least pretext: “Go look after your nerves, darling, I feel better facing all these worries alone…” Nadine at the seaside tried her best to read Proust, such penetrating novels, but what was the goal in life of all those people? She strolled along the beaches in the company of American ladies, an English boxer, flirtatious gentlemen dressed like fashion plates — and these people too had no goal in life, they served no purpose whatsoever, and the sight of them would have been demoralizing had it not been so ridiculous. She was invited to a pigeon shoot. Rigging yourself out in white flannels to perform serial execution on birds — how perverted! It made her sick. Only in small fishing ports, reading Zola, did she feel good.