Dung and carrion give up the last of their moisture under the ochre sun, the people have been buried, there are now only parts of walls and the decomposing bodies of animals to testify to what has happened, in your statistics you count people on one side, livestock on the other, there must be some connection, a correlation, so many human corpses equals so many animal carcasses, I say this because by counting all the rotting carcasses here, and there really are a great many, it should be possible to infer a figure for people, just by counting the carcasses, the stench layered in the grey air, moisture which shivers in the heat, the stench shimmers suspended in the oppressive air, how does the paladin manage when there is no rain maiden to defend? Ask Pétain, Max, but pack your bags first, don’t forget, we’re here to put an end to the violence.
The agent told him about the four years he spent teaching in a boys’ school, in the Middle Atlas, you know it can get pretty nippy up there between November and March, but each boy brought his own wood to burn, you should have seen how fast they learn French, and the black-winged storks on the roofs of the first purpose-built schools, you made the most of the opportunity to give them nature lessons, the preparations for their long journey, what do storks do in May? A boy puts up his hand, he has it off, sir, Max saying the natives have killed eight Frenchmen in Casablanca, we bombed the whole of the native quarter, we occupied Casablanca, they killed Doctor Mauchamp in Marrakech and we occupied Oujda, it’s practically eight hundred kilometres from Oujda to Marrakech, but Oujda is a very attractive town, so we land there, they always manage to kill one of ours, result: planes, cannon, reprisals, occupation, the whole country, to civilise it of course, and teach it about storks and the present indicative.
In the Riff, the agent for Native Affairs had held his own against Max for as long as there was light to see by, but after dark around the fire he said I don’t like all this, I’m in favour of a fruitful war, inevitable but fruitful, History advances because of the bad things History does, but I don’t like it, and it’s worse in the Spanish zone, I put Pétain in touch with Franco a couple of months back, it was unspeakable.
Max changes tone, turns to the wife of the Consul, just because the Master here turned me into a Pied Nickelé doesn’t mean I shouldn’t express the gratitude felt by my stomach:
‘Madame, this lamb is remarkable.’
The pink diplomat has his nose in his wineglass. The mutton is hard and very rare, very rare and hard at the same time, how do they do it, yon bogus Clappique obviously knows, ‘remarkable’, the old hypocrite, an oikish compliment for uncooked sheepmeat that still reeks of farmyard, and Xavier has asked for more! He likes that sort of thing, all those uncivilised smells, should have seen him just now in the garden, standing in front of the mangrove, absolutely loves it, as soon as there are larvae, blobs that look like snot, embryonic life without arms or legs or eyes, jellyfish membrane, mudflat smells that catch you in the throat, all gurgles and effervescence, like the earth sucking itself off, all those bubbles and craters and spurting green sap, he’d like to splash about in it, and he claims he likes opera better than I do, that he’d comb Europe to get his hands on some recording by Tadeo, what he really likes is when things squirm, anything you get in places where things squirm.
Monsieur Xavier Poirgade likes crabs, he’s come up with a crab to look out for, a horrible creature, first time he told me the name I laughed out loud, one claw is huge, the other one’s normal, but the large one is as big as its whole body, they’re called fiddler crabs, it starts at puberty, Xavier can spend hours watching out for one of these crabs, he’s eating too fast, he’ll spend all night complaining, and this red wine, a Beaujolais which has not travelled well, fit only for a spinster, doesn’t even deserve to be pissed away, they’re all eating without paying any attention to what’s on their plates or in their glass, manners like savages.
*
‘Yes, young gentleman of France,’ Lilstein says to you yet again in the Waldhaus, ‘in those days I really believed in the Tukhachevsky conspiracy, in ’37 I was part of what was left of the secret Party apparatus in Berlin, Hitler was everywhere, and our first concern was to hunt down the Trotsko-Bukharinians, I do what everyone else is doing, I give names, I use Tukhachevsky to oil the wheels, a Bonapartist plot, they swallow it without any trouble, I am young, I am implacable, to say the least.
‘But very quickly I get the feeling that I myself am starting to slip, the fashion then was for meetings around a table where every member had to denounce his neighbour, it was risky attending meetings like that and the point was for each of us to take pot-shots at everybody else, like they did in Moscow, I didn’t care for that little game, it was crazy, you could come a cropper because you were right-wing, and if you steered clear of the right you got the chop for your left-wing tendencies, you kept a constant eye out for anyone with that bloodthirsty look about them and anybody who seemed in his right mind was your best friend, I once tried to get out of a fix by telling a story.
‘Found it in Gogol, it’s about the servant Pelagia who takes it into her head to show Tchichikov’s coachman the way, now because she can’t tell her right hand from her left she gets all mixed up, and Selifane the coachman bawls her out and yells “be off, you and your dirty feet, you can’t tell the difference between right and left”, we’re all like Pelagia, right? Oh it was a stupid thing to do, and I knew I’d have to pay for it at the next meeting, one of us had already remarked that the things I said were amazingly irresponsible, I was about to have my very own plot, I’d last six months, if that is in the meantime the Gestapo didn’t start poking its nose in.
‘Three months after my little performance at the meeting, Stalin gives his speech on the draft constitution of the USSR, German translation, circulated clandestinely, and at the next meeting all the comrades gave me very strange looks, my story, the one about Selifane the coachman and Pelagia of the dirty feet had also been told by Stalin in his speech, I’d anticipated him by several months, I became an untouchable, a pure coincidence, we lived at a time when Gogol was probably the most topical read there was, but with Stalin there was no such thing as coincidence, I had also learned by heart numerous Lenin quotes, I managed to slip one in about the flexibility which all organisations must have, the atmosphere around me relaxed, a short while later a rumour went round to the effect that I was about to be summoned to Moscow, it was lucky for me the Nazis picked me up before I left, though maybe in Moscow they wouldn’t have really had it in for me either, I’ve walked in a lot of rain without getting wet.
‘The moral of the story is, in a nutshelclass="underline" if you want to travel fast read Gogol, expect the unexpected, apply no rule too strictly, let the keepers of the laws have the pleasure of reminding you of them, always pay crude compliments to the lady of the house, use your knife to cut lettuce, even if you know the old story about oxidation by heart, it will let the people you have to deal with occupy the high ground, they love that, they’ll want to teach you what they know, but you too will know interesting things, almost ten years ago you were one of the first to know that the alleged report attributed to comrade Khrushchev was genuine, soon the Americans will invade Vietnam, I will tip you many, many winks.