“Has this splendid escapade lightened your mood, Nadine? Shall we go?”
They left the cellar. The street was deep in its midnight reverie. They paused at the gates of the Luxembourg to look in at the sleeping garden, utterly different from its luminous or hazy daytime self. A whiff of decay drifted from piles of dead leaves. Bare boughs peopled the darkness, striking motionless poses without shadow or duration.
“The future,” Nadine said.
D seized her brusquely by the wrists.
“I didn’t know you were so weak. I forbid you to be like this. What are you afraid of? Being killed, like so many others? It would only be a relief. I tell you we’re starting our life over again — blindly. All we ever worked for was life, in the end, we’ve got a right to it.”
Emerging out of the asphalt and the shadows a shuffling form approached: it was an old man in a dented felt hat, leaning on a cane. A hoarse voice spoke to them softly from the depths of weariness: “Ya’ shounna make a scene ’frunna the little lady, M’sieur. What can she do about it? Don’t you agree?”
“Hear that?” D exclaimed, “the night itself is speaking to us… What can you do about it?”
The limping form passed on, leaving a trail of words waning behind. “Course night shpeaks sometimes, why shounna it shpeak, night? Gotta be…”
Nadine and D burst into laughter together. Let’s go home. The cafés threw their cozy glow across the intersection. At the end of rue Soufflot, the peristyle of the Panthéon guarded a necropolis eerily blanketed in mists, but life, simple and unadorned, retained its usual charm along the boulevard Saint-Michel.
Precaution might be regarded as an abstract, practical science, analogous to geometry (the non-Euclidean kind, needless to say). Given irregular surface A, bounded by mobile straight and curved lines D (for danger), insert point Z, likewise mobile, into one or more zones W (work) at the greatest possible distance from lines D… Bear in mind as you perform this exercise that the dynamics of the problem include unknown quantities O and I, pertaining to a fourth dimension that corresponds to enemy levels of organization and intelligence. Further bear in mind the fifth dimension P, for psychology: nerves, fear, betrayal; and, lastly, random elements X. To all these oppose dimension U (us), comprised of our own organization, our own intelligence, our own nerve. From now on, as far as D was concerned, the seventh dimension U was coterminous with the fourth, fifth, and sixth! Point Z was left with nothing to guide his movements but a demagnetized compass. No support from any quarter, and everything to fear from the services to which he so recently belonged. As days went by they were regrouping, positioning their guns, spreading their nets. It was impossible to guess what they knew, what orders they would receive, how they would plan to strike. The hypothesis of calculated inaction, however implausible, could not be ruled out. In formal terms, D’s resignation infringed none of the articles of the special law that entailed the death penalty; but resignation was not envisaged by any of them. An unwritten law dictated the elimination of agents who were guilty of grave disobedience, and disapproval of the regime was the worse disobedience of all, implying the revolt of that metaphysical X — personal conscience — whose mere existence could not be brooked, for it would pull down the whole edifice of what we called “iron discipline” and others called, “corpse’s discipline.” As a citizen, D came within the scope of legal provisions for the punishment (death, without trial, on simple proof of identity) of soldiers deserting abroad, even in peacetime. He knew all about the ruling psychoses, for he was standing up against them. The notion that a man might bow out without betraying, as faithfully as it were humanly possible (the vagueness of that formula!), faithful to the extreme of objecting to the intolerable, and its destruction of us; that a man might withdraw only to vanish into insignificance, well, any of his chiefs willing to believe that would be deemed a lunatic, or an accomplice to be liquidated without delay.
He discovered that the absolute of trust no longer existed for him. Without that unshakable feeling, clandestine work would be impossible. Trust that the Organization would never let you down; that no matter what the crisis, no matter how acute, the Organization would never cease to weave its tight defensive web around you; that each and every member of the Organization, regardless of personal feelings, would accomplish his anonymous duty toward you; that the top of the hierarchy was staffed by leaders wielding infinite powers of secrecy and authority to ensure that no one came to grief, save at the behest of the most supreme necessity; the confident knowledge of these things endowed one, amid all the risks of the profession, with a victorious sense of security. (“None of us will perish, except by his own fault or at our hands!” one chief had proclaimed. “There is no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle!”) And D had served some fifteen years in a dozen countries, including that terrifying wasps’ nest, the Third Reich, where all the sappers were themselves sapped with diabolical meticulousness…
Now his rendezvous with Daria was causing him small but insoluble problems. He had no doubt that she could be trusted, that she must be going through a phase of deep distress, that she was bound to him by a friendship more definitive than love. But, for those very reasons, she might herself be caught in an invisible net. Behind a front of desperate hypocrisy she too had begun to break away. They suspected it, because no serious assignments had been entrusted to her for six months. “Take some time off,” they said, “you deserve it after all you went through in Spain…” Eventually he settled on a plan. He would telephone Daria and give her fifteen minutes to get to an address on the reliably uncrowded rue des Saints-Pères. We’ll synchronize our watches and I’ll pick her up in a taxi and take her… where? The most convenient place would be a room in a discreet hotel. But though she’s no prude, Daria might well feel offended by the awkward pretense of a lovers’ tryst. And chambermaids have been known to eavesdrop, and walls have peepholes, cleverly drilled by silent voyeurs… We’d look like the most suspicious old couple, drawn by neither pleasure nor vice, brother and sister, ravaged by mutual confessions… Paris, for all its bottomless resources, had no haven to offer to a farewell meeting that boded nothing but desolate frankness.
D ruled out museums, churches, railway stations, squares, parks, both the Buttes-Chaumont and Monceau, tempting though they were; it might rain and the November cold was biting; it would be so melodramatically glum that they might just as well go to PèreLachaise, or make one last pilgrimage to the Mur des Fédérés — fortunate Communards, to die with all the future before them! Hang the weather and what it might do. He wanted the open air. We’ll go to the Jardin des Plantes. The small cafés around the botanical gardens have quiet back rooms that are often sought by troubled couples. The most dramatic marital scenes, played out in low voices, shock neither the waitress nor the patronne who keep a sly watch on the proceedings, hoping for another banal tragedy to be splashed over next day’s paper: STAR-CROSSED LOVERS SINK IN SEINE or AFTER SHOOTING FAITHLESS LOVER, WOMAN TURNS GUN ON SELF. The headlines come to life when you recognize the photos. That’s them, they were at the far table, remember? The dark-haired girl, with the cruel lips, “I said to myself at the time…” Such strokes of luck are rare. Most couples make up, or annihilate each other in ways that provide no pickings for crime reporters.