When I was a boy I really liked drawing animals, a town kid who dreamed of forests, the ochre, the rejection of unnecessary ostentation, it was Lena who talked to me about ochre, she loved it, to describe alto voices people usually talk about grey voices, she tried to put ochre tints in hers, she used to say it takes hours to get a good ochre tone into the voice, this bookshop isn’t making my head spin, what I like about bookshops in the West is that they make your head spin, you go in, you don’t know what to look at first, but here there’s no chance of being disoriented, lots of pictures, not much printed text, children’s books.
My young friend is watching me, it’s clumsy, not as young as he was, it’s true, despite his beige coat, he’s still my young Frenchman, known each other for thirty-five years, he looks as if he’s absorbed in the book he’s reading but he’s watching me as if he’s up to some tomfool nonsense, personally I’d never have arranged to meet him in an alley, too many risks, no, there’s no risk with him, no trap, he said there’s something I need to buy, come with me, at your age it’s time you got into what we call the comic book.
Rather droll these rabbits, they’re watching the duck, they’re sitting on their back legs, one front paw against their cheek wondering, they prattle, they listen to the duck’s promises, ‘a good life of peace and calm will take the place of terror and dread’, I don’t like alleyways.
The young woman at the cash desk saw the two men come in, the beige coat and the grey mackintosh, the older man, the one who’s parked himself in the corner with the Gédéons and the Babars, he’s the same build as Gilles, Gilles isn’t so tall, he’s the older of the two but he stands up straighter, he looks nice, shy and nice, afraid he’s going to bump into things, of upsetting things, but he holds himself straight, it must be the first time in his life he’s been in a place like this, they must have known each other for yonks, they don’t need to be forever talking to each other and smiling as they talk, it’s their fault I’ve lost the thread of my plan, just three days before the essays are due in and I still don’t have a plan, a simple question, why are they asking it? because there’s a chance that reason isn’t historical, that there’s no reason in History, because it eludes History, which means that what goes on in History isn’t rational, careful, don’t change the question, it’s not ‘Is History rational?’ it’s ‘Is reason Historical’, that said, it’s linked, one of the two men looks as if he knows about books, the one with the beard and the beige overcoat, what sort of Reason would not be historical? if Reason looms over History, I don’t even know where I’m heading, three days before it has to be in, the one with the beard must have been insufferable when as a young man, like Gilles, no, I’m being too hard on Gilles, I’m going to need at least twelve pages, last time the prof said you’re not developing your thought enough, I’m too concise, Mum is always saying it takes forty years to make a man, I’ve been living with Gilles now for over a year.
The duck is talking to the fox, the snail, and with Ursula Owl, Salsifis the badger, Lilstein smiles, Ursula is also ochre, the rabbits are either grey or ochre, a quite solid grey which lightens into blue-grey for the walls of the houses, the sky, the church steeple, a play of graded shades, there’s also a deer, just like in the poem by Johannes Becher, Becher didn’t merely write the words for the GDR national anthem, ‘Risen from the Ruins’, he also wrote about nature, he included a deer in one of his poems, ‘in your goodness, as you pass through the Black Forest you will permit the approach of a wary deer’, that was in 1953, the death of Stalin, the goodness is Stalin’s, now Gédéon the duck is trying to convince Martin, the big bear, ‘you’ll be able to laze in the grass in the meadows all the livelong day’.
Exactly the sort of thing to promise comrade Big Bear, Lilstein knows a bear who not that long ago would have landed Gédéon a hefty wallop with his paw, not for lazing around but for encouraging others to, it was possible not to work, though without overdoing it of course, taking it easy, provided you gave the impression of working very hard indeed, though not so much giving the impression since no one believed you, but behaving as if you really were, and if everyone can manage the ‘as if’ part then you really are in the land of workers and there is no such thing as laziness.
It wasn’t laziness, people over-exerted themselves with being lazy but it wasn’t laziness, they pretended to be working because other people pretended to pay them, or else the opposite, during the war it must have been different, but I never fought in the real war, not in the classic sense, in the camps we went even more slowly, except when a guard came along, and besides war doesn’t last for ever, it wasn’t the same for actors, they went at a proper pace, got properly paid too, the Berliner Ensemble four days before a dress rehearsal was a virtual cyclotron, the actors worked really well, and fast, and they weren’t the only ones who didn’t pretend.
Gédéon is holding a meeting at Burntwood crossroads, a tall copse, the trunks of trees with holes big enough for a boar to hide in, there are two deer in the listening crowd.
In Becher’s poem, the ’53 poem, there was only one deer, it had just sat down on a bench, by the bust of Stalin, Lilstein suddenly remembers ‘you will stand tall there, Stalin, and in your goodness you will permit the approach of a wary deer; with Lenin, at eventide, it will settle on a bench, and Ernst Thälmann will come and join them there’, in the background the rabbits watch, they look as if they’re having a good time.
For a rabbit to have a good time, all you need do is give him a mouth shaped like a V, all the animals are there, their eyes have the pupils in the corners, that leaves a lot of the whites of the eyes showing in the drawing, makes them look attentive, drawing is a very suitable activity for a man’s retirement, I’ll go back to it, an activity that doesn’t cost much, table, chair, paper, pencil, four walls around you, it all depends on what kind of space they enclose, nine square metres, that’s a prison, actually you can live in nine square metres in a town, but if you don’t have enough money to go out much it’s like a prison, fortunately there are supermarkets, and an electric hot plate to cook on, my room is ten square metres at most, that’s what’s left when I subtract the floor-space of the lavatory and shower, a maid’s room, apparently I was extremely lucky to have found one on the Boulevard de Port-Royal, especially with lavatory and shower.
Every evening around ten the woman next door plays the accordion, I’ll have to revise my budget, the cost of living is very high here, food, I was good at drawing, until fifteen, sixteen, especially objects, turn-of-the-century telephones I could do very well, and cars, I even did some watercolours, but I wasn’t as good at bodies, I never knew how, my cousin Agatha was the one who was really good at bodies.
Terrific nudes, genuine art studies, during the slump she used to sell them to lads from the lycée so she could buy food and clothes, one day a boy showed me a drawing of a woman with her legs wrapped round a man’s waist, head back, unsigned, Agatha’s style, twenty times more expensive, I thought she can’t be short of anything, she went to America, found work as a draughtsman.