Narrow walks sprinkled with clean gravel stretched through the Ornamental Shrub Nursery, the Pod-Bearing Trees Nursery… The rusted shrubs, white sky, and rectilinear lines enclosed a shrunken landscape. Daria said, “I’ve brought you a message from Krantz.”
Unexpected. Terrible. Had Daria appealed to him on orders, rather than in distress? Was he walking into a trap?
“Krantz? He’s in Paris?”
“Don’t worry, just a tour of inspection. It was him who got your letter.”
(“He had no right to open it… Or every right, perhaps…”)
“I work with him. He knows we’re friends. He was so understanding about it… I didn’t know there was such kindness in him. He said to me, ‘Poor fellow! His service record is outstanding, we’ll fix him up with a special posting in the Far East. The war is coming, and we lack men of his caliber. Find him if it’s the last thing you do… Tell him he has nothing to fear for the moment, I have a lot of pull and I’ll stand up for him. His nerves have given way. Do you think mine are in good shape? And I won’t inquire after the state of yours… These are terrible times we’re living in, rife with wickedness, we need blind faith and boundless energy or else we’re lost, I mean all is lost, because him or you or me, we hardly matter! I can still burn his letter and persuade them to be lenient. He can’t remain abroad of course, but I promise him a challenging job in strategic economics, good hard work a long way away. They’ll forget all about him, and then they’ll reward him, and one day he’ll thank me for having saved him from himself…’ So there you are. Krantz begs you to meet him, just for an hour. I believe he means it…”
“You do…?”
D’s blood ran cold. He shouldn’t have met with her! Pure sentimentality — idiotic — the memories, the heroic years, and the rest, a quagmire. How many times has Krantz delivered himself of similar speeches? And how many dupes and dead men does that make? And if he does mean it, which he might, is the system equally sincere? The system doesn’t give a hoot for the sincerity of a Krantz, it goes its own way. Good job I only gave Daria twenty minutes to get dressed and meet me, or she could have alerted the whole pack for all I know. She did have time to phone… A stooped figure turning the corner into their path riveted D’s attention, until he saw the small boy who caught up and clung to his grandfather’s hand. D’s ideas went off on a new tack. Informed by Krantz, Daria is now hopelessly compromised and she knows it. What fate can she expect? Unless she moves against me, no-holds-barred. That would be her only lifeline, and a precarious one at that. D feigned assent.
“Krantz is a very fine comrade.” (To himself: How has he survived so long?) “I don’t have to tell you, Dacha, how hard these last days have been…”
He turned toward her with a wry smile on his face. “You know, I was in a cabaret the other night, and there was this big girl singing a soppy love song:
“Somehow it stuck with me — though I’m not the sentimental type — and I sent her a bouquet, with a card from my next-to-last alias. Red roses, naturally.”
He couldn’t meet her steady gray eyes.
“I’ll see Krantz, he’ll burn my letter, and I’ll go home. If I’m brought before the disciplinary council, I can bank on ten years — without the letter. Rehabilitation through labor, that’s what I’d like. If Krantz is as influential as he claims, I’ll put in for a navigational job on some great Arctic shipping route…”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. This garden’s like a cemetery. Let’s go a café downtown. No need to hide anymore. You’re my salvation, Dacha, and I’m glad it was you. You, the same as in Feodossia… I’m very tired, you know…”
“Don’t do it,” said Daria sharply.
The same, indeed, as in the old days. Her child-nun face scarcely marked around the eyes and the corners of the lips by the hardship of living. Hardening.
“Krantz can’t help you — no one can. If you go home you’re lost… You’d be lost even if you’d done nothing. And I’m probably as doomed as you are.”
They were face-to-face and he impulsively moved closer.
“Then let me be the one to save you. Come to us. Wherever we find a safe haven, I’ll call you.”
“You do me so much good,” she said, enlightened.
D was already regretting his impulse. His apprehensions had been turned around too simply. How to see into the true depths of another person? He had flipped from humiliating mistrust into effusive fondness.
Boulevard de l’Hôpital has little character. One trudges past drab buildings, factories, the Salpêtrière, to the noise of locomotive whistles from the nearby station. There are brewery trucks, cement mixers, Maggi dairy vans, railroad trucks; a Cadillac, here, would stand out like a lady in a haute couture outfit from the place Vendôme. The space is vast and colorless. Events there must be commonplace, like registered trademarks, without the pathos of luxury. There Daria and D found a secluded café with tan leather upholstery, brightened by blue piping. “When, if ever,”Daria wondered, “will there be bars like this at home, so cozy and unpretentious that you don’t even notice?”
“When we’re dead. We had not the faintest inkling of the sweat, blood, and shit that go into forging a people’s well-being…”
“Careful. You’re sounding like a big capitalist. Don’t you think what’s needed is a greater effort of generosity and intelligence? The days of primitive accumulation are behind us.”
“Not in our country. And the days of destruction lie ahead.”
Thus they embarked on the double monologue around a common obsession they share with other troubled minds. “For two years now, I’ve been living in a kind of dark hallucination,” Daria said. “Me too…” “You know that business of the embezzlement of Forest Trust funds, part of some dirty scheme, I forget which? Well, I happened to be involved, I carried a part of the funds, I know where they were going and on whose orders! And there was the Fat Man confessing his head off, spewing his poisonous drivel left, right, and center, poor fellow, what they reduced him to! I read the papers, listened to the radio, heard his voice, plausibly delirious, began to doubt reality, I couldn’t look people in the face, I went through the streets covered in shame… I tried so hard to understand. Is it possible to understand? Please, Sacha, don’t put on that hangdog suicidal look.”
“Suicidal, did you say? On the contrary, I’m fighting to stay alive in order to understand, to witness the next chapter and the epilogue… Could we have got it horribly wrong on some hidden point? I don’t think so. The planned, centralized, rationally administered economy is still superior to any other model. Thanks to that, we survived in circumstances that would have made short work of any other regime… But a rational administration must be humane. Can inhumanity be rational?”
“Sacha, I’m going to ask you a question that might seem thoughtless or infantile, but listen to it anyway. Didn’t we forget man and the soul? Which are perhaps the same thing…”
“We did, because first we forgot our own selves. Individualism — once you get beyond the crude Darwinian law of the war of all against all — is no more than a sorry delusion. And by overcoming it, we were able to raise up a heavy piece of the world, able to become better, more energetic people. That’s why my heart is with those who have forgotten their very names and won’t appear in the history books, either, after serving as the catalyst for events that will never be fully understood, since the people who brought them about will remain unknown… Our unpardonable error was to believe that what they call soul — I prefer to call it conscience — was no more than a projection of the old superseded egoism. If I’m still alive, it’s because I realized that we misrepresented the grandeur of conscience. You don’t have to tell me about the deformed or rotten or spineless consciences, the blind consciences, the half-blind consciences, the intermittent, flickering, comatose consciences! And spare me the conditioned reflexes, glandular secretions, and assorted complexes of psychoanalysis: I’m all too aware of the monsters swarming in the primeval slime, deep inside me, deep inside you. There’s a stubborn little glimmer all the same, an incorruptible light that can, at times, shine through the granite that prison walls and tombstones are made of; an impersonal little light that flares up inside to illuminate, judge, refute, or wholly condemn. It is no one’s property and no machine can take the measure of it; it often wavers uncertainly because it feels alone — what brutes we’ve been, to let it die in its solitude!”