“It came crashing down a month ago,” she said. “Quite a fall!”
“No one killed, I hope?” Bruno asked out of politeness, naturally assuming that no one would be killed out in this lonely place.
“No, no! People only come here on Sundays, during the good weather. It was a weekday and out of season… Just a dog trainer who lived in a hut.”
“Of course,” said Nadine, as if in agreement. “That doesn’t count. Good day, Madame.”
They retraced their steps, feeling sobered and yet amused. A cliff battered by the tides cracks open, starts to shift, becomes treacherous moving earth of unstable times, begins to slide; a distant rumbling gathers force, a keening, a subterranean chant, a song! A hunk of chalk and clay, long accustomed to the blistering winds, breaks off and pitches forward slowly like an instantaneous murder. Insignificant catastrophes are prepared and consummated much like those of whole societies, heralded by a mounting murmur that can be heard, provided one has one’s ear to the ground rather than listening to jazz. “Nothing to worry about,” is the complacent response, “we’ve heard such noises before, the world is perfectly stable, the proof, look how healthy we are…”
“I can still hear that stupid lady saying ‘Oh no, no one was killed…’ ” began Noémi. “ ‘Nobody but a dog trainer.’ Think of him, patiently building his shack out of bits of wreckage, sleeping alone under the fissured cliff to the sound of the tides, waking up to this bleak landscape… I wonder what he trained his dogs to do? Fetch starfish? Beg on their hind legs for a lump of sugar? How many contingencies had to come together for him to die here with his dogs!”
She sized up the cliff face with a glance.
“Do you know, I wouldn’t mind living here myself. It looks solid enough. I’d happily run the risk… Then if one night we were buried under tons of rock, so what? It’d be natural. No one else, just us…”
Bruno said, “Soon they’ll be writing, ‘just’ a town, ‘just’ an army, ‘just’ a people, ‘just’ a country… A little country under a collapsing cliff… In a time of wholesale collapse. Professionally trained military staffs are this minute working out the figures for the whole of Europe, in accordance with various scenarios. The first year of the war will cost X million young lives, resulting in an X percent fall in the birthrate and having X impact upon production. Not unlike planning for the annihilation of, say, Belgium — machines, bodies, and souls under a toppling Himalaya… It’s only a matter of time. Our calculations are as precise about the initial time frame as in predicting an eclipse… The latest possible date is already settled, though events may well jump the gun. The madman-god of history is in a hurry…”
A nippy salt-sea wind had risen against them. Noémi turned around, the better to be enfolded by it. She saw Bruno trudging toward her, hunched, bareheaded, his hands stuffed into his pockets. His determined tread over the slippery stones, his wrinkled brow, the bitter set of his mouth, made her shout, “What did you say? I could hardly hear… the wind… Sacha…”
“Nothing… nothing.”
With all his strength, he wanted to shout, “Nothing… I announce Nothing! Cruelty, destruction, madness, nothingness… Nothing!” For this long-ripened vision burst within him with the impersonal clarity of a mathematical formula explaining the past, the murders, the future. “I have to stay… To defend… What? You’d defend nothing, you’d disappear before you could move. Nothing is possible… The magic word, the keyword of our time: Nothing.
“If only I could be one of those industrious ants who will soon be trying absurdly to rescue a child, an injured man, a tool, a book from the rubble of some flattened city… One of the infinitesimal brains working underground in enemy strongholds, tirelessly sapping the bureaus of the planners of destruction… The final justification of life: to destroy the destroyers without knowing whether one is not, in reality, finishing the job for them.”
He cried out into the wind, with a bitter joy, “Nadine-Noémi, I’ve found the formula…” (A gulp of salt air made him cough and spit, touched by the thought of poison gas attacks.) “Here’s the formula: the destroyers… will be destroyed… destroyed!”
The wind suddenly dropped. Noémi let him catch up, and he put his arms around her.
“What were you shouting, Sacha? You looked half insane. It suited you, actually.”
“Nothing.” (Is that word to come up again and again of its own accord, is it my answer to everything?) “I was thinking we should stay, whatever happens. I’m fond of this world, and we should stand up for it. I’m ashamed to be running away…”
“Stay, where, old friend? Doing what? You know what would happen… It hurts me as much as you.”
Disheveled, he shook his head, losing his excited grip on the vision, annoyed to be showing his weakness.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be boarding ship in a little while. I’m tense and I’m depressed, that’s all. I need rest. It’s nothing.”
Nothing. Another discovery of lucidity. If you were fully conscious of it, could you go on living? You always return, without knowing how, to your own reasonable normality. That’s better.
They boarded the liner quietly in the afternoon. Unimpeachable passports, the real thing at last, and the right nationality — Blackshirt Italy inspires such confidence, not like the travel passes of stateless aliens or Spanish Republicans! There were no obviously suspicious characters among the groups lining the quay (or there were nothing but). D felt almost disappointed at things proceeding so smoothly. They took possession of their cabin which was decorated in two colors, cream and blue. D asked the purser about their neighbors and any notables among the passengers: there was Herr Schwalbe, the diamond magnate, and his lady wife; Pastor and Mrs. Hooghe and their small son; Monsieur Gilles Gurie, French vice-consul at… ; Miss Gloria Pearling, the dancer, and her secretary. “Excellent,” said Mr. Battisti, “I see we shall be traveling in good company…” “Most emphatically, Monsieur. We also have Crown Prince Ouad and his court, and the American philanthropist, Mrs. Calvin H. W. Flatt…”
“Oh là là!” commented D, in a vulgar voice that contrasted with his manner and diction.
The purser disappeared down a staircase leading to the bowels of the ship. So one is saving his diamonds in time; another has religiously wound up his European tour with its museum visits, evangelical dinners, and surreptitious, burning glances at the perdition of Paris; the third is off to his pleasant sinecure overseas, congratulating himself on dodging the prospective mobilization, at least for the moment; while the platinum-haired dancer drawls to her copper-haired secretary — chosen for contrast. “Alone at last, darling!” crude as the hand she claps on a dusky breast. And who’s this prince? An Egyptian? An Iraqi? Awash in dollars stained by the sweat of Bedouins and fellahin? Does he go around in a burnoose, for photogenic effect, or as an habitué of Monte Carlo? Is he interested in oil? Will he seduce the philanthropist from Chicago or be seduced by the dancer? Our purser seems to have taken his cast from a penny novelette. So it goes. To each his checkbook, and may the world go to hell! The joke is that in all probability these are people — possibly excepting the prince — who are innocent of the least villainy and who would be amazed to learn that they have no more notion of what’s happening in the world than do moths crackling blindly into lanterns in a garden… At the end of a chic garden party, of course. The only counterfeit in this company is myself, for I am fully authentic. The only one who knows what he is running from, and wishes he were not fleeing… Or else I have too much trite imagination.