“Don’t think too much, Erna, it drives you off the track. It becomes unlivable. The good thing about war is that it leaves no time for thinking. All you care about is not getting killed, finding something to eat, killing someone else, destroying something, and holding out another day. It puts your consciousness at ease, by suppressing it. The misfortune of prisoners is that they have time… I’ve just spent two extraordinary days, Erna, windows flying open inside my skull, my skull was like the ruins, with empty casements gaping on all sides, the sky pouring in, and the winds, the memories, the future, all this in the form of ideas without form. I couldn’t sleep, nor could I make any order out of the mess in my mind. I let it go, I thought: Either I hang myself tomorrow, singing ‘Why do you tarry under the moon, Marlene, Marlene?’ or else the mess will settle, I’ll see things more clearly, decisions will have been made… It’s now been proved, Erna; I’m not destined to hang myself. I’ve decided.”
The nurse found him childish.
“And what have you decided?”
“I’m changing my life, changing my soul. I’ve realized that everything in this world is geared to destroying mankind, to destroying me, among others. Everything: even the faith I once had. The Party, the triumphant revolution, I used to believe in all that. Deep down I still believe in it, but only as one believes in a dream after waking… I am on my own. I have the right to want to live, even through the decline of Europe. The right to defend myself and to run away. From now on I only want to serve life — my own to start with, the only one I’ve got.”
“But your life will no longer be of any use,” Erna objected.
“Say rather that it will no longer be of any use even to me? That I won’t be able to forget and that I’ll be a mere ectoplasm in the ruins or join the rodent band of schemers and survivors? I was afraid of that. But no. I am alive. I am the proof that some such remain! I take things in my hands and I work and I make something exist that didn’t before. I’m nothing, you might say? I take destruction, suicide, folly, grief, and joy and I create something new and meaningful out of them, I restore meaning to the corpses of men, cities, and ideas, to the thistles growing over them, to the stars that rise in the sky despite everything, to the lovers who walk over the earth or lie decomposing beneath it… From all this I knead an unknown substance which is my gift to all eyes, or to some eyes…”
“Art?”
“Yes, art, though I think I despise that word. I know too much about its impotence. I’ve witnessed the exhibitionism of those greater or lesser swindlers who are more con than artist, I know all about the scams of dealers and merchants, the publicity circus and the snobs in New York or elsewhere who gush — whether it’s a piece of shit, a bloody marvel, or a dark conundrum — ‘Too too fantastic, darling!’ Art be damned, if that’s all it is! But who is to bring the first hint of order to chaos, of light to the caverns, of hope to the graveyards, of balm to the wounds, who is to place a love incarnate among broken beings, an irrefutable reason beneath the cataracts of absurdity? Who else but the artist? Tell me who!”
Erna answered feebly: “The revolutionary.”
“Oh, really? Show me one, give me one name — a living one, mind you, because we could make up a dazzling catalogue of dead ones. I’ve been through the east, between escapes and arrests, I went over the lines with some German refugees. I was robbed, beaten up, and what have you by the comrades, I don’t hold that against them. I know what they’ve suffered and are still suffering, and I know what man is now. I sought among them men of faith, men of ideas, men of justice. At first my fresh illusions were protected by an elephant’s skin of ideology. Then I found the men I was looking for. They were all convicts. Every machine rolled over them. Little lieutenants who were big brutes would blow their brains out as an example, to scare the rest. I remember one of these killers shouting: ‘I need to speed up the pace here, work faster!’ I watched the road crews hacking away, nothing but women, children, old men, and I don’t know what else, not to speak of enemy prisoners. I saw them bogged down, squelching half starved through the Lithuanian mud, first-class mud it was too. It was easy for them to escape by burrowing into the mud, at the risk of getting buried and of getting your companions shot for it… I was working there too. One day on a slippery, disintegrating embankment I met an ex-sailor who spoke French, knew Marseille, who had just returned from the penal colony at Kamchatka and was nostalgic for the fisheries there. ‘So how many of you are behind the great Fatherland’s barbed-wire fences?’ I asked him. ‘Millions,’ he answered, without appearing to say anything sensational. This made me furious. ‘You’re lying! Someone should have perforated your counter-revolutionary brain long ago!’ ‘You have a point there,’ he said seriously. ‘I don’t know why I’m still trying to hang on… They promise us pardons and bonuses… But listen to me, brother, before you condemn me out of ignorance.’ We spent an hour together in the rain working out the rough statistics, by social class and by region across Eurasia… He’d been expelled from the Party, a militant from 1920 who had heard Lenin speak in the factories… A patriot and a socialist in spite of it all! Tell me it isn’t true!”
“It’s true,” said Erna. “I know it better than you.”
Alain seemed sadly satisfied.
“Once I knew a man who was authentic. A man who served. Who probably carried out his fair share of dirty work as well. A man of knowledge and will. He was strong. I believed in him. And I believed he betrayed us. I would happily have killed him. Now I understand. The traitor was myself, who understood nothing. There’s a truth about man and a truth for man, don’t you see?”
“Quite so,” said Erna dryly. “Who was he?”
He told the story as though he were sketching successive images on a pad. Erna saw a familiar face come together in the silky river dappled with leaf fronds and patches of sky. It was exactly the feeling she had experienced, in another universe, when writing the rigorous, nebulous text of a private diary whose every line was surrounded with blank spaces, silences, shadows, secret lights. She tasted sand on her lips. There is no escape from oneself or from numbers. Numbers are what give rise to chance, and this can be a prodigiously significant flash of light: the thing that counts.
By breaking the rule of secrecy, Erna unconsciously made a decision without which she could never have pronounced the syllable formed by a single initial.
“D,” she said. “I knew him too.”
Alain felt no surprise. The nature of his astonishments had changed. An exploding bomb would have startled him, but only out of instinct… But that there should be virginal grass, a simple possible future, this troubled and confused him.
“Well,” he said simply, “then you know what kind of man he was.
“Peace must be declared to the world, and at long last all the victims must be told that it’s over, over for good. That we will reconstruct with justice, after a ruthless cleansing, without forgetting that it’s the most wretched who have the greatest need of justice… Proclaim freedom, even in the midst of abysmal poverty. They hardly go together, true freedom and miserable poverty amid the rubble and tombstones; you don’t need much Marxism to see that. But the match is necessary if moral poverty is not to be added to the other kind. How can the survivor be consoled, how can he regain hope and courage if he’s not allowed to have his say — and if he stammers, that’s his right! — and to shoot his mouth off if he feels the urge? It’s a relief to mouth off when you’re backed into a corner. How can we reconstruct without first constructing a new chaos, but a chaos this time of ideas, utopias, vengeance, and generosity, an unheard-of freedom — which would be quite simple in reality?”