People began to speak politely to Berthier, to chat, no one had cause to complain. The naval attaché had left on scheduled leave; on the second floor people had resumed watering the papyrus, the ends of its leaves had stopped turning brown, that truly stunning gold-brown that appears on the tips of the green leaves, but it’s a deadly sign, the papyrus is a hardy plant but at the first hint of drought it dies.
And Madame Cramilly? No one had noticed if she’d started talking to the papyrus again, but it was likely that she was thinking about it, she seemed to be scared of Berthier but she always seemed to be bumping into him, she said hello, oh yes, people had started saying hello again, they were physically in Moscow, but they were among French people and living under French law! A guilty person was being hunted, but not ruthlessly, no one was being liquidated, so different from what the Ivans would do in the same circumstances. In the French Embassy the only thing liquidated was vanity, people spoke of this and that and reached an accommodation with their consciences. Until such time as consciences would become quite shameless.
And this included even Madame Cramilly, she had probably not started talking to the papyrus again but she now tried to talk to Berthier, scared though she was, she had already spoken to him, on two occasions, the second time at her behest, it lasted two hours, and subsequently it seemed that he was avoiding her and she was running after him, jokes were made about Berthier being harassed by an old lady who kept pestering him for another big session to go over important points.
What did Madame Cramilly look like? she looked like the old lady in Babar the Elephant, exactly like the old lady in Babar, small, a matchstick, thin lips, grey bun and pointy nose, no, she didn’t wear a shawl over her shoulders, at least not at the office, a straight dark dress, cream collar, no jewellery, Berthier avoided her, but the old lady from Babar refused to let up, she had information of the greatest importance to give him, information that came from a very confidential source, she must have talked to Berthier about it once, he avoided her the way we seek to escape the agreeable and persistent caricature of ourselves that we all carry in our heads.
Sometimes Berthier looked happy, human. Had he discovered something?
Yes, a face in the carpet, or a pair of rabbit’s ears in the shrubbery, things which vanish when you change the angle and stubbornly stay wool or leaves, he didn’t discover anything at all but in the end he knew everything about everybody.
Only de Vèze had refused to talk to him.
‘Her name is Vassilissa,’ Berthier had informed him bluntly, ‘and she’s playing you for a fool.’
Berthier also went looking for hidden microphones, he tapped all the walls, he talked to himself in a whisper, affectionately you might say, he spoke vacantly to some person, to the furniture or his screwdriver, like Madame Cramilly and her papyrus, but the words weren’t the same, do it for me, come on, be good, bitch, a whisper, a pointer, a lead, shit, he fenced with his screwdriver, do it for me, and his voice rose as he got to the last word, to ‘me’, grew almost strident, more so than when he’d been ‘sorreee’, then he started taking two-hundred-year-old items of furniture apart with a screwdriver, a hammer and the frenzy of the deranged, he started getting edgy with people again, he reverted to his previous vicious form as a persecutor of the innocent.
None of this discouraged Madame Cramilly, she was determined to have her long talk and seemed to know at any given moment on what floor Berthier happened to be, along which corridor he would pass, and she would lie in wait for him, she asked for that serious talk about important matters, or else when their paths crossed she said nothing but looked him straight in the eye to make sure he didn’t forget that by refusing to talk to her he was committing a professional mistake.
At other times she would walk behind him without his being aware of it, and when he realised she was there he would scowl, though he never succeeded in putting her off.
True enough, people began to tease Berthier, they’d say ‘good morning, Madame Cramilly’ when they saw him coming down the corridor, to make him believe that she was behind him, it got so he no longer dared go up to the second floor and the papyrus, so the second floor became a haven for relaxed conversation, as someone remarked one day:
‘1 don’t know if the papyrus really talks or if it’s worth spending time trying to talk to it in private, but at least it allows us to chat among ourselves.’
So Berthier changed tactics, increasingly he would hole up in the wretched little room that de Vèze had allocated him, no window, only a sort of horizontal slit with a pane of frosted glass over it which didn’t open, and when Berthier summoned a suspect to his rat hole, the suspect began by commiserating, it’s grim in here, couldn’t you get anywhere better than this? it’s like being shut up in a cupboard.
He never responded, he would let the suspect score a point, sit down at a roll-top desk which must have dated from the 1930s, so that the suspect sitting across from him could see only the outside of the lid which Berthier opened after a few minutes, it was not possible for the suspect to see what there was inside.
With an ordinary desk, when you enter an office, you can see what’s lying about on it, but not with a roll-top, Berthier would glance at intervals inside his desk and then look up at the suspect with his empty eyes, of course there wasn’t anything in it, or maybe just an empty file, or the CV of an irreproachable civil servant, a few notes about the suspect from Intelligence, ‘the concierge reports that…’
And Berthier would look into his desk like some small-time cop in a cheap detective novel, nothing to get nervous about, he could just as easily have left a file with the suspect’s name on it lying around on his desk. All phoney.
Finally, he’d close his small-time cop’s roll-top desk with a screech of slats made of old, dry wood, and too bad if all he had to go on were the few months that such or such a suspect had moved, at the age of nineteen, within the sphere of influence, as the expression has it, of the Communist Students Association, ‘within the sphere of influence’ because he’d never had a card, for someone had told the suspect that you should never sign up officially for any communist organisation, it leaves a permanent blot on your record.
The suspect had got a card under a false name, but he’d never trusted the secretary of the branch who had issued the card, a Stalinist, when the suspect had raised the matter of records the branch secretary had said ‘no, in our records there are only aliases’, and smiled, and in that smile the suspect thought he read contempt for his chicken-hearted petty bourgeois fears whereas what he saw was most probably the hypocrisy of the secretary who knew for certain that real names were also entered in the records, but in those days it was himself that the suspect did not trust and he’d been convinced that the branch secretary was sneering at him.
What had Berthier got in his roll-top desk? a note claiming that the suspect was once a sympathiser of the Union of Communist Students? Or a photocopy of the stub of his membership card, with both names on it, the alias and the real one? That was all a long time ago, the branch secretary who had enrolled the suspect as a member of the Communist Students was also a member of the Party, he was highly respected among the students, small voice, small build, small glasses, a tireless worker, destined one day to be a famous linguist, he’d been to a Congress of World Youth in the Ukraine and had come back with a small jar containing tchernoziom, that black earth so full of promise.