Illusions about the power of the press? or maybe the newspaper had something on him, or maybe for the fun of it, you’d never guess how many people do this sort of thing for the hell of it, I know a secret, I mustn’t circulate it, if I circulate it I run the risk of being publicly disgraced, real Russian roulette, click, no one saw, didn’t get caught, and I’m king of the castle, actually no one ever did find out what the minister’s reasons were, it was even suggested that he was the Russian mole, a charge of culpable intelligence with the enemy could have been made to stick, but he didn’t know enough, and besides the mole didn’t stop digging.
And it was for this that de Vèze had been obliged to leave in his bed a woman who will never forgive him for the coarse words which had passed her lips, so there was a mole at the top, or in a major embassy, as seemed very likely.
A major embassy? could it be mine? Was all this designed to promote a few plumbers? The Americans had already tried the same thing under de Gaulle in ’66, de Vèze remembers it well, it was a year after the famous evening in Singapore, the Americans and the ‘porous’ French! They claimed to have names.
At least at the time we didn’t allow ourselves to be taken in by silly stories, no one believed that guff about having the names of dodgy individuals, they did it to pay us back for a speech de Gaulle had just made, in Asia, at Phnom Penh, a hundred thousand people, interminable ovations especially when he said that the Americans were facing ‘a national resistance’, that they should pledge to send their troops home, wild cheering, and then the best part, yes, it guaranteed everlasting hatred, that there was ‘no way the people of Asia would ever submit to the rule of foreigners who came from the other side of the Pacific’, Charles the Great, the Americans were purple with rage, a Moscow agent couldn’t have done better, we’ll teach you ‘rule of foreigners’, de Gaulle is just an agent for Moscow, Peking, any country that’s coloured red, a radical act of betrayal, he never liked us, never forgave us for Yalta nor for our support for Algerian independence, no, that’s not paying us back in our own coin, the domino effect, it’s not the same, we’ll explain it to you some day if you want to hear it, for the moment we’ll destabilise you, there’s a mole in de Gaulle’s entourage, a hefty rumour, totally spurious, the Americans came clean about it much later, if you get the message, a load of codswallop, it was all part of the game.
But now, in ’78, there’s a full quarantine, it’s already lasted more than a year, the counter-espionage people are very frustrated, they’ve been through all the biographies, pulled skeletons out of cupboards, set these people against those people, all hands on deck, plus a hunt for queers, like in England, suicides of a handful of men with wives and children, they also interviewed former members of the Normandie-Niémen squadron, why did you go to the USSR at that time?
‘To have the pleasure of taking orders from a general who is a traitor!’
The same treatment meted out to old friends who had worked alongside communists during the Resistance, Guillaume, he’d told them straight:
‘Go ahead, I’m used to it!’
And he pointed to his finger-tips. At the end of six months they’d had to tell the other African light cavalryman to call off his dogs, real moles aren’t easy to catch, true, but we’ve still got this damned quarantine to deal with, rumours, echoes of echoes, and even the Italians seem to be keeping things from us.
It was so good, before, in the desert, ‘de Vèze, you lead’ and away they went, ‘you’ll link up with Amilakhvari and his Foreign Legion brigade, he’s got six hours to make it, before sunrise’, and away we went, over sand and shale Bir Hakeim or Qdret-el-Himeimat, 1942, an adventure on sand and shale against Rommel.
Then one day, much later, a formal dinner in Singapore, ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’, some guffawing jester with big ears shouts these words at you, old but sprightly, had a way with him, shady type, like Scapin in the play who never lets anyone put anything across him, everyone around the table found it hilarious, and it takes de Vèze nearly fifteen years to realise that the jester was right, it took until the day the companions who’d shared the Great Adventure started refusing to have dinner with him because the morons in counterespionage were busy setting up tradecraft here there everywhere.
Now if de Vèze has understood correctly, the Minister is asking him to take the strutting cockerel to Moscow, in his diplomatic bag, it’s a provocation, stay calm, they’re trying to force you into a wrong move.
De Vèze becomes engrossed in his scrutiny of the large brass inkstand which occupies the left-hand side of the Minister’s desk, it must be a good thirty centimetres tall, two horses rearing up on hind legs over two hooded urns, two riders, one holding a drawn sabre, the other a lance, de Vèze wonders when this object might date from, it could be Second Empire, but are they cuirassiers? They don’t have breastplates, hussars? no, these have helmets with a crest and slung over the flank of one of the horses there’s a rifle, so they’re dragoons, Third Republic then, but before 1914, when some people still pretended to believe in lance and sabre charges, grand-scale heroics, or the very first days of the Great War, charging at the Hun with sabres drawn before the statisticians at HQ had worked out that as a tactic it meant large losses for small gains.
De Vèze’s father fought in the 1914-18 war, was in it until 1917, the year he lost a leg, never talked to him about the war, military medal, croix de guerre, Legion of Honour, mentioned in despatches many times, and never a word about the war, a silent hero, the house was all silence, his mother even more silent than his father.
All de Vèze knows about the First World War he has got out of books and from a handful of tales told by friends of his father, away from the house, there were also a few personal reminiscences of his junior schoolteachers or masters at his lycée, men who had gone to fight, the need took them sometimes, towards the end of the afternoon, instead of teaching the syllabus they’d look out of the window and start to talk, it was always the same thing, in the end we stopped paying much attention, we felt they had an urge to tell true stories, but at the same time they didn’t want to put us off, and even when they’d started with a note of anger in their voice, anger against war, wounds, dying, the screams, the stupidity, that pointless war, it nevertheless always ended by sounding like what got printed in the newspapers on the eve of 11 November, no one was going to say we fought this war for nothing, we owed it to the dead not to admit anything of the sort, anger against war, anger against Germany which hadn’t wanted to pay up, still hadn’t paid up, nothing very specific about the war itself, de Vèze’s friends knew his father, were proud of having a friend with a father like that, they also were proud of boys who were orphans, but that was less tangible than the wooden leg and walking stick of de Vèze senior when he crossed the school yard to go to his class.
One of his father’s friends told him a tale or two of charges launched by the French cavalry at the very start of the war, follies perpetrated by dragoons, what a joke, an embryonic charge cast in brass on the desk of a minister who can’t ever have been on a horse in his life, or picture the Minister sitting backwards on the horse, the sabre in one hand and the gee-gee’s tail in the other, think Daumier, an urge to chuck it all in and shoot off for a week in Dinard with Little Miss Jealousy, he’ll have to earn forgiveness for the disgraceful words she used, all his fault, a room with a view of the sea, a good way of getting it all back together again, breakfast in bed, croissants, she slices her croissant open, spreads red-current jelly, closes it and dunks.