At last a pale and weary young man appeared, the one they were to interview. Pavel shot a close-up of his face, his moving lips, his reddish eyes. The words the young man spoke were no more than a distant drone. He talked about non-violence, about moral renewal, about the freedom to believe in anything you wanted to believe in, about how they had to grasp the historical opportunity that had just presented itself.
What was an historical opportunity?
Merely a moment when people believed they had managed to disrupt the flow of history and thus open up room for manoeuvre. Whether they had actually done so, or whether they had actually closed something off is a judgement that could only be passed by history itself.
The interview was over. The young man had to hurry back to his committee meeting. If they would like to wait, he said, the meeting would be over in about an hour. Then they would learn more.
Sokol looked uncertainly at his cameraman.
'Sure, we can stay here until morning, if you think it's useful. It's certainly more interesting here than at home in bed.'
He went back into the main lecture hall where the bespectacled young man was still talking. Meanwhile the number of sleepers on the floor had increased. He found a free spot by the wall, folded his coat to serve as a pillow and got ready to stretch out. A student who was lying to his left watched him. 'If you haven't got a blanket, go into number eight. They'll give you something there.' Her clear articulation and her resonant voice suggested that she was an aspiring actress.
'Thanks,' he said, 'but I won't be here long so it's hardly worth it.'
'Then you can have one of mine. I've got two.'
'Thank you, but I really don't need it. I'm warm enough.' She could have been his daughter. Everyone here could have been his child. What would his son have been doing now?
'Suit yourself,' said the girl, and she turned over to go back to sleep. An annoying light filled the room, and the air was acrid with the smell of tired human bodies. For a moment it reminded him of nights in his prison cell long ago, except for the girl beside him. And that strange, almost exultant mood that seemed to bring everyone, including him, closer together. This feeling of solidarity had surprised him. He wasn't prepared for it, and in fact he'd always resisted it — or certainly ever since he'd become aware of the laws that governed life in the prison.
Perhaps if he hadn't gone to prison he might have married and would now have children of his own. Not only did prison teach him that he always had to watch what he said and did in front of other people, but he was out of circulation at a time when his contemporaries were forming relationships, and he squandered the rest of that time when they released him. He'd been driven by a mixture of ambition, anger and guilt about his mother. He'd also been poor. He had wanted to go to university, but his prison record meant that was out of the question. He'd worked as a driver's mate and later got a job in a photography lab, and then was finally accepted on to a correspondence course. During that time, he'd met a lot of women and had made love to some of them, though he'd trusted no one. He hadn't wanted to start a family with any of them, and anyway, most of them already had children. In the end he lost the ability to tell whether he was genuinely fond of a woman he'd met or not. And his son remained unborn.
The door to the lecture hall kept opening and closing, and the sound of many voices mingled and overlapped. A telephone was constantly ringing on the other side of the wall, pulling him back from the brink of sleep.
The day before he flew off to Mexico, he went to his
studio with Albina. It was still afternoon, but they took their clothes off and lay on the couch and made love. Then they drank wine and coffee, made love again, drank more coffee, and she told his fortune from the grounds. She saw precipices and abysses that seemed impossible to scale or cross, and it made her sad. Fortunately, above that she thought she recognized a bird of prey with its wings spread wide. That might be him, and he might fly across the mountains and further still, but would he come back to her? Then she remembered that he had once mentioned a story he was working on and would like to film one day. She asked him to tell it to her.
It was just a rough idea, he said.
'I'd still like to hear it. As a way of saying goodbye.'
'It's not a story to say goodbye with.'
'Why not?'
'It's about something else.' He put his arms around her. 'I don't remember ever mentioning it to you.'
'I'd like to hear it.'
'In fact, it's not really a story, it's just a bunch of images. I enjoy coming up with images. Maybe one day I'll string them together into a story, and that will be for you.'
'So, come on, tell me. Don't make me twist your arm.' She was lying beside him and he could caress her body, touch her breasts, as he spoke. 'Who's the story about?'
'You know, I don't even have a name for him. He's just called 'he'. Sometimes I think that he's really me, but then we split again, because I'm different. I'm sorry, I'm not being very clear. This person is a carpenter like my father. But that's not important. He's successful and rich and famous for his carvings. Then he has a bad accident and loses his right hand.'
'How old is he when this happens?'
'Not very old, but by that time he was already famous. He doesn't want this to stop him working, so he tries to carve with his left hand, but when he does manage to finish something, it's as though it had been made by someone else. That crushes him. He feels as though he's lost himself.'
'Doesn't he have a family?'
'He has two sons, but they don't live with him. Their
mother took them away when they were still small. After the accident, they come to see him in his studio where he has a lot of carvings, some finished, some not. There's a bird taking flight, a tiger getting ready to jump. Icarus, and Prometheus bound. His sons want to know what he's going to do now. He replies that they needn't worry, he's already done enough in this life and that he is simply going to live and think.
'He really tries. He walks about the city and the countryside beyond, but the things he sees demand that he give them a shape, and he has to reply that he can't, and that depresses him.
'He stops going out of doors. He drives things and people out of his mind, until he finds himself in a state of emptiness, one that bears no resemblance to any countryside or any space. It is true emptiness.'
'And what about God?'
'He doesn't believe in God.'
'But God exists.'
'No one knows that. But he's not waiting for God. If he's waiting for anything, it's for death, and he's curious about what the face of death will look like. Will it be like an old woman who creeps about the world with a scythe, or will it be a beautiful young girl who approaches him with open arms?
'One day he gets an invitation to visit an old uncle of his whom everyone in the family thinks is crazy. He has nothing better to do, so he accepts the invitation. After all, he's living in emptiness. I imagine the emptiness of this particular day as a yellowish fog through which the occasional outline of a house becomes visible. Suddenly, however, a black raven emerges out of this yellow fog. It stands on the rim of a fountain and stares at him. Then it spreads its wings as if it were getting ready to fly away, but it doesn't. It merely watches him through its small, clever eyes as he enters his uncle's block.
'The uncle has an interesting face that reminds him a little of Spencer Tracy. The one thing that gives the uncle's life meaning is drawing up family trees. He looks for direct ancestors and, as far as his strength will permit, searches
through other branches of the family as well. The uncle tells him that he's managed to get as far back as the sixteenth century and has found unknown soldiers, surgeons, impoverished gentry, martyrs tortured by the Inquisition, village magistrates and many generations of serfs. He has discovered a branch that once lived in Burgundy. In his cupboard there are piles of maps and reams of graph paper on which he had drawn the different branches of his genealogical charts. The uncle announces that he intends to leave all this to him.