One day, the suspect learned that this sometime Stalinist branch secretary had left the Party to which he had been so attached, he had made his first trip to Peking and when he got back he had worked for six months in the front line of the class war, as a prole in a sardine cannery in Brittany; Prunère, the branch secretary who had become a Maoist was called Prunère, had been ordered to return to Paris, to join the Maoist organisation’s central committee, his dialectical skills being needed in the ideological struggle against revisionism in the French Communist Party.
In Paris, the comrades could listen to Prunère for hours, fascinated by his dialectical skills, all the grassroots members who pasted and repasted thousands of posters on walls, those who handed out leaflets in the suburbs at six of a morning, those who stuffed newspapers up their lumber-jackets and anoraks as a protection against being beaten up by the lackeys of the bosses and/or revisionism, those who printed their leaflets at night on an old roneo machine which tore the stencils which then had to be retyped, those who helped the peasants get the hay in, or swept up on factory floors. You over there, go and dig in!
And You over there duly dropped out of his second year at law school to hump breeze blocks on a building site or can sardines, those who suddenly abandoned their studies when ordered to, so that they could meet the proletariat, they were all fascinated by the dialectical skills of Prunère, the Stalinist-turned-Maoist, and as the great work proceeded of sticking up posters, handing out leaflets, being smashed over the head, getting the hay in, and of wheelbarrows full of breeze blocks being trundled by the grassroot membership, Prunère the Maoist rose up through the ranks of the organisation.
The more the comrades put themselves about, the better Prunère was able to speak on their behalf at a senior level in the hierarchy, he had himself worked in a sardine factory, not for ten years like the others, just for six months, but it had been enough for him to acquire the kind of proletarian experience the organisation needed, he’d returned to Paris, on an even higher rung, he played a fundamental role in the ‘revolutionary vigil’ while carrying on with his university studies, he drew up documents containing charges designed to confound the forces of revisionism, both the objective revisionists and the bogus objectively bourgeois revisionists, he kept an eye on the proponents of autocriticism, and maintained the thought of Chairman Mao Tse Tung in all its purity.
One evening during a meeting devoted to maintaining the purity of the thought of Mao Tse Tung, Prunère singled out one comrade and demanded that she be sent away for a spell of manual labour at Noeux-les-Mines and then told another he should go and do likewise at Carmaux, now everyone knew that those two comrades were living together, he accepted but she kicked up a fuss, she was a sociologist specialising in the mechanism of the exploitation of the proletariat, a girl of solidly middle-class background, comrade Prunère accused her of continuing to exploit the proletariat she claimed to be defending, she then launched into a piece of very elaborate argumentation.
She said that by making a career in their revolutionary organisation Prunère was exploiting the work of grassroots militants, that if he was able to pursue a career therein as a permanent officer in it he did so on the back of the thousands of hours which the militants gave freely in the service of the organisation, all Prunère needed to do was say that her socialism was ‘narrow and blinkered’ to end the argument and, since the sociological comrade had quoted the work of a number of Yankee pseudo-scholars in her erroneous thesis, she was excluded without further discussion. The motion to exclude her was drafted by the comrade who was living with her.
The stub of the membership card carried only the alias, that was standard practice in those days, so Berthier has got zilch, but what about that little matter of the hashish when the suspect was working in Morocco, but his Moroccan friend, a colonel in the gendarmerie, had hushed it up, two hundred grams, not worth bothering about, but don’t be so stupid in future, surely you know that the kids who sell the stuff by the side of the road are in cahoots with the gendarmes just a kilometre further on, if you must smoke, come along to the house, the family are away, everyone will be having a good time, there’ll be dancing girls from the village, but bring some good cognac and some Havanas, I prefer them.
Berthier has got nothing on the suspect, the suspect isn’t actually a suspect, but all the same the suspect searches through his suspect’s memory, an over-payment of salary which he’d never reported, that business of the cheque that had almost landed him in it, so that in the end the roll-top can contain many, many things, and everybody appeared for a second time before Berthier and his desk, a stack of secrets, whether inside the roll-top or not, and a large number of suspects, a car which had been in an accident and had been sold on without full details being divulged to the buyer, a large sum which had been omitted from an income-tax return, a bank account at Klosters or Lucerne, because Geneva is for small-fry, two or three stupid letters written to friends who had sought asylum in Franco’s Spain although you never shared their opinions about French Algeria, a gambling debt paid late, now that could cost you dear, a couple of days spent in Vienna with that Polish guy, true you’d never seen him again but you’d never reported it, a Pole or a Romanian girl, that could turn out expensive too.
Brother Berthier wasn’t even in a proper office, he occupied a cupboard, without a proper window and without any form of heating.
‘That’ll teach him,’ de Vèze had said.
Berthier couldn’t care less, he’s the one doing the teaching, he keeps his parka on, and he blows hot and cold on tenured colleagues and fixed-term staff, the civilians, the uniformed, the wise, the devious, the weak and the proud, his strength lies not in knowing people’s secrets but in his success in convincing them that they have secrets from him, and they’ve always known that it’s not right, Berthier waits, he lets the suspects sort through their secrets all by themselves.
*
In the Waldhaus you listen to Lilstein, he’s not wrong, he repeats, ‘we no longer serve a useful purpose, young gentleman of France’, you’d better listen, call a halt to the whole thing, no records, no records clerk, if what he says is true you’re in the clear, you’ve been playing this dangerous game for more than twenty years, you could get out now, without a scratch, you could go on living in Paris, meeting whoever you like and not have a worry in the world.
What does worry you is that Lilstein looks a broken man, his word was ‘melancholy’, but you’ve never seen him like this, if he doesn’t stop, he’ll end up clinically depressed, and then one day he’ll say ‘the hell with it’ or something similar, and he’ll throw his hand in for all the world to see, it would be to your advantage to anticipate events, to go over to the other side and be the one who turned first.
Are you going to betray Lilstein? He’s never put you in any danger, you don’t betray someone just on impulse, there’s a small matter of honour, and beyond the matter of honour there’s this: if you do go over to the other side, what baggage will you take with you?
If you have nothing of value to pack, it means at best fifteen years in a cell in the Santé prison, and everything you’ve done up to now will have been meaningless, it’ll be your turn to be depressed, but here’s the worst irony in this whole mess: you’re about to shut up shop at the very time when at last Lilstein hands you a right royal scoop: Afghanistan. You remember your old pact: ‘we’ll be equals’, Lilstein had said on that very first day.