Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  (At least admit the possibility. All that remains is to make it happen.)

  That they would never again lay eyes on other, more humble places, clothed by winter snows more stirring than the gilded blues of Sorrento. Separately and together they both had this thought — and pushed it away.

  “You have a lot of strength left, Sacha …” Nadine said sadly.

  (Too much to no longer be of any use …)

  “I’ve always believed that a man is identical to his will.”

  She concurred, with her most limpid gaze, wondering whether he could be altogether sincere. Was he saying it to comfort her or to comfort himself? A man’s will counts so little these days — and his counted not at all now, not even enough to contrive a shaky salvation for them … While he, calm thanks to a courage that might only be a form of discouragement, told himself that will is sometimes no more than a breastplate clapped over a puny torso, stiffening the despair beneath. In order to exist fully, the will demands a goal.

  “I almost like this room now,” Nadine said. “It’s so quiet outside. And those glimmers there across the boulevard are like flowers reflected in water …”

  He refrained from pointing out the inaccuracy of the image. The nocturnal glimmers of Paris are those of a raging commercial furnace: not flowers or lakes, but electric discharges insinuating themselves into the nervous system in order to get people to buy and sell debauched pleasures! The hotel was drowsing off. The whine of the elevator grew fainter, a door closed, the plumbing boomed and gurgled, noises that were a part of silence, a reminder of the many disparate lives winding down their daily cycle. The one certain communion among men is found in exhaustion, in sleep. In the pathos of sleep all faces look alike, resembling the faces of the dead. Under every forehead, dreams play out nearly identical primordial desires in shifting arabesques, but there is no reconciliation there.

  “We’re free tomorrow, Nadine, we can sleep for ages.”

  To sleep for ages, a wish that reverberated within him. They got into their parallel beds, then Nadine, her milky arms raised and crossed behind her head, said, “Come here to me, Sacha,” because she was touched by a chill of loneliness. Their bodies met without the exaltation of love, letting go to a simple carnal tenderness. Closely entwined, they felt the same warm wave bring them the relief of simple existence. “Don’t think, above all, don’t think,” D repeated to himself. He succeeded, a healthy discipline. Nadine, whose rosy half-moon lids had closed, suddenly froze, her pupils wide and staring. “Listen … that noise behind the door …” Instantly master of himself, D watched the door in a mirror. The revolver within reach. A subterranean crackle came from the hotel doorbell, and stopped; a lethargic footfall grew fainter on the stair … “It’s nothing, darling,” he said, “don’t be afraid.” He caught a glimpse in the other mirror of her frantic face. The deep inner wave rocked him anew, a radiant smile erased the expression of apprehension verging on horror in Nadine’s features.

  The world sank back into an order bereft of excitement, communion, and joy in which one is content merely to have lived, and to be suffering from neither a toothache nor an immediate terror. “Protect your peace of mind, Nadine … I don’t like these frightened attacks of nerves. We’ve run so many risks before!” Many, yes, but minor ones compared to what was in store, poisonous spiderwebs stretched across the final break with all the reasons for living — ideas, cause, motherland, unity in danger, invisible battle for the future, vision of a forward-marching world! Everything was falling apart, only risk itself remained, impoverished, coarsened by the loss of any real justification. “It’s awful, though,” Nadine said, “I must get used to the idea that …” D followed the curve of her fingers, the sheen of her oval nails, as she wiped the beads of sweat above her eyebrows. Who? This absurd jealousy was humiliating. See how weak the liberated man free of old moral conventions is in you! Nadine sensed that lying motionless beside her, he was slipping away from her. “Don’t leave me,” she said plaintively.

  Mechanically, thinking exactly the opposite, he heard himself say, “Your encounter with Alain doesn’t make anything worse.”

  “Sacha don’t mention that name to me ever again if you can help it. I hate him.”

  He understood, obscurely but totally. “It’s really not worth hating him, Nadine …”

  Before settling down to sleep, D went out to case the corridor. Two pairs of shoes left for cleaning outside the door next to theirs caught his attention. The male pair was repellently smart: gray snakeskin with crepe soles. The woman’s shoes, pushed out of shape by bulging feet, suggested an overweight person always trotting about town. “Miserable creatures,” thought D as he listened to the mingled snores of the sleeping couple. Back in their room, he glanced down at the street over which the row of lamps stood watch. Nothing alarming there. Nadine, her profile buried in a pillow under a tangle of hair, was asleep, a big, lovely, pacified child. “There is no sin in you, Nadine … Instinct knows nothing of sin …” He was hurting nonetheless, and reproached himself for thinking in terms of sin. Oh, what did words matter! The two loaded Brownings, each covered by a handkerchief, were luxury playthings, perfectly appropriate for their intended purpose, crafted in noble metal for the grand game of murder and suicide. We’ve come a long way since the flint dagger, such a cumbersome instrument for killing oneself! Did the primitive Ancestor have any inkling of voluntary death? Or is that an attainment of the higher civilizations, which offer no other means of escape? Let’s hope some analyst will one day elucidate this psychological question. As for myself, Mr. Analyst, I can’t help believing in an innate drive toward destruction and death. We will only have a true sense of the splendor of living in some distant, still-unimaginable future; perhaps we will have it … And that perhaps is our greatest justification, it even implies, for now, a sufficient justification of suicide … D switched off the lamps. Through the curtains a dim lacework of light patterned the room.

  In the depths of slumber, Nadine felt an obscure — colossal — vise tighten impalpably around her. Formless tentacles turned into cold serpents twining around her body, a thick hawser weighed upon her neck. The black car opened to reveal its cramped cells. In each an upright cadaver was propped. Nadine was a little girl walking barefoot through thawing snow, reanimated by the vivifying burn of the icy water. A volley of bells rang out, Christ is risen, risen! There was an onion dome of fiery red peppered with golden stars, swaying horribly over shabby wooden houses, it’s going to fall, it’s falling! The Black Maria with its cells is leaving; it didn’t come for me but for other people, so much the better — not for me! I’m ugly and I have abominable thoughts. Crows flapped from one tree to another, for you, we come for you, they shouted, to pluck out your eyes! “But why must I be hanged?” Nadine demanded of the stern, hairless face that had popped up close to hers. Its lips moved slightly. “Hanged, no.” The serpent knots unraveled, vanished, the rope snapped, the gun went off in a violent spurt of night-blue flame within a rainbow cloud of smoke. The horror was in not being able to move — Oh god, it can’t be, it’s a bad dream, I’m going to wake up … Nadine woke up. A motorcycle was backfiring in the street. Her watch said 5:45, the hour of executions, more or less, when executions have an hour. It was still dark. She could only reconstruct the nightmare in incoherent snatches. Her hand shook as it reached for the tumbler of water. She nudged at a fold of batiste with her finger, and found herself intent upon the small Browning. Two squeezes of the trigger, and both of us would be delivered … Her hand shook worse because she was more frightened of this temptation than of all the darkness in the world. Through the fabric, so as not to feel its magnetic touch, she picked up the gun and leaned out of the bed to propel it onto the floor, under the other bed, Sacha’s. This move did her good, but now she could see herself in the mirror, a whitish specter looming indistinctly in the ever cold and twilit region where the dead await their turn to be reborn — or not, since resurrection is just another dead superstition
… “Resurrection is dead, it’s a scientific fact.” Without thinking, she switched on the bedside light. Sacha was asleep on his back, broad forehead, thin mouth, protuberant blue-tinged lids, scarily unlike himself. Detached from the universe. Dead. Nadine weighed that certainty. The icy chill from beyond the grave became an all-encompassing peace. I am dead as well. It’s good. It’s simple.

  And Sacha opened his eyes as he did every day of his life, those preoccupied eyes, wise, real, and infuriating.

  “What’s the matter, Nadine?”

  “Oh, nothing, I thought I heard …”

  “It’s a motorcycle. What a lout, making a racket at this hour! Lie down. Go back to sleep.”

  He exasperated her. The exasperation melted into tenderness.

  “I love you,” she said in a childish voice. “I love life, I love death, it’s strange …”

  His voice echoed hers: “Strange.”

  * * *

  Monsieur Gobfin, assumed by unobservant clients to be the hotel desk clerk, actually performed much more important tasks. The trust of a proprietor ill with a kidney problem invested him with quasi-managerial status; and if he spent the busiest hours of both day and night behind the little reception counter, distributing the mail, hooking and unhooking the room keys, it was mostly due to his love of the job. An eye on everything! Seven minutes’ walk from place d’Anvers, six minutes from the confluence of the rue de Clignancourt and the boulevard de Rochechouart, this hotel was like Lutetia itself, a kind of vessel anchored in the middle of treacherously troubled waters. Fail to count the linen returned by the laundry two days in a row, and you will soon count the cost of your oversight. Neglect to appear in the kitchen two hours before the first sitting for luncheon — and talk about pilferage, my rascals! A reasonable level of theft, let’s say around ten percent is par for the course because in this world, or at least here in Paris, everybody’s got to eat; but the house has to make a profit too, eh? And Monsieur Gobfin would never stand for “being taken for a fool, what with the price of Normandy butter.” “I’m nobody’s sucker,” he’d say, and people took his word for it.

  Monsieur Gobfin’s long sparse hair, glued in black strips with brilliantine over his yellowed scalp, along with his hollow cheeks, conveyed such a knowing, indulgent sagacity that his eyes hardly ever strayed below the relatively higher zones. The brown, skittish gaze that never rested, shying away as soon as it encountered another’s, shot out simultaneously in several directions, scrutinizing the clients from bottom, sides, and angles, homing in on the glints of soul that show through in the back of a man’s hand, the cut of a coat, the timbre of a cough, the manner in which a pen is gripped or a bill examined. A glint of soul, needless to say, is an excessively literary flourish in this context, foreign to Monsieur Gobfin’s vocabulary. He would rather have said, “how shall I put it, something like an odor, at times even a bit of a stench.” His perusal was apt to begin at the level of the gut, for the belly is infinitely expressive: a pederast’s paunch can never be confused with that of a public works engineer who goes for the tarts in the Lune-Qui-Rit bar. The rotundity of the con man is quite unlike, say what they will, that of the stockbroker, who is equally devious but for whom the letter of the law is sacred. The fabric of which garments are made, their quality, their color, their buttons, their wear, tear and care — all are of a revealing eloquence. It is impossible for a sea captain, when in civilian dress, to wear the same three-piece suit in the same way as a fashionable type who specializes in trafficking female slaves — white, black, or other. Their hands, exposed below sleeves or cuffs, the hair on male hands, the bumps and furrows of the joints, the rings on the fingers, say more about someone than identity documents, which are, at least one in ten, expressly designed to say nothing … Monsieur Gobfin was unaware of being a profound psychologist, but practically speaking that’s what he was, to the unappreciated extent that it is possible to be one without leaving that vast circle bound by sordidness, cunning, stupidity, and police intrigues. His attention was trained on couples, vices, crimes, expenditures. He could instantly sniff out the legitimate couples, “mousey-spouseys” to him, and these were intriguing only if they hinted at some louche flaw, rare perversion, drama of the wallet or the groin, all of which were easily detected. Illicit couples, for the most part, offered little of interest. (The hotel was too respectable to let rooms by the hour, with some exceptions; but for the night, one couple’s money is as good as another’s and the gentleman who checks in with a prostitute generally doesn’t look too closely at the little extras on the bill …) But hidden crime, now, crime that ripens all by itself behind an innocently harmless exterior, festering beyond the reach of newspapers, prosecutors, and scandal — there lies the common yet rare substance of human relationships worth studying silently from an observation post like his. Of course, the crasser breed of criminal needs to be screened out in short order, to avoid bad publicity. Guided by intuition alone, one night when business was slow and half the rooms were free, Monsieur Gobfin put on his most ingratiating voice to lament, to the giggly young lady in the expensive straw hat and her small-boned gentleman friend with hair dyed the color of flax, that there was nothing available, and sent them to the competition: “You’ll find it very comfortable there, Madame, Monsieur. They’re even a bit more modern than we are!” (Two days later he learned in Le Petit Parisien of the sudden and suspicious demise of this industrialist from the Rhône, whose mistress was being sought by the prosecutor’s office … It was one of the supreme satisfactions of his life.) He likewise saw off the obese individual bursting with commercial probity — a respected notary, solicitor, company director? — who turned up with a transvestite playing the part of the young mistress to perfection; the competition found itself the scene of an uproarious farce, kept quiet by a hefty sum of hush money. Monsieur Gobfin was only half gratified by this outcome; he took pride in his perspicacity, but missing out on a hefty sum because of it is galling, you have to admit.

  Police Inspector Barougeot regularly dropped by around nine a.m., glanced over the registration forms of the foreign guests, scribbled down a name or two for the sake of appearances, and repaired to the dining room in the company of Monsieur Gobfin, where the two of them sat over hot black coffee washed down with a shot of vintage marc. At that hour of the morning, the restaurant was bathed in pleasant white light. Two Englishmen were wolfing down their ham and eggs; an old lady was munching croissants, with a romantic novel by Gabriele d’Annunzio propped open before her. Inspector Barougeot showed Monsieur Gobfin a batch of photographs being circulated by the information and investigation services (as well as a few private agencies). Monsieur Gobfin put two of them aside, not seeming particularly curious about either. “The reward is two thousand francs,” the inspector said. “Skinflint millionaires …” he sighed.

  Monsieur Gobfin concealed his nervousness, which turned him yellower. By twenty past one, the need to talk had grown so pressing that he went up to the dining room. Madame Noémi Battisti had just left the table and returned to room 17. Bruno Battisti was reading foreign newspapers and nibbling on raisins and nuts. At the other end of the room, the Negro sitting alone at a table had started his lunch. There were some other, insignificant people, like the man and woman who had business interests in Dijon, and their pale daughter, sapped by solitary vice. With no apparent hesitation, for his hesitation was inner, Monsieur Gobfin toured the tables making a slight bow beside each one, like a head-waiter.

  “Monsieur Battisti, isn’t it?” he said. “We trust you find the service to your satisfaction. Today is our day for Burgundian cuisine …”

  D had seen him coming. He folded the Berliner Tageblatt.

  “Er … yes, an excellent meal, thank you very much … Couldn’t be better.”

  Both felt that the emptiness of these words had done nothing to clear the air. Something made each of them hang on to the other. In D’s case, the desire to know “what’s eating this stool pigeon with the face of
a worried bedbug” made him adopt a hypocritically debonair expression that was almost engaging. More complex emotions raged within Monsieur Gobfin as he wrestled with indecision, on the brink of small but unknowable risks.

  “Why, you haven’t touched your coffee, Monsieur Battistini …” (Was it some kind of a ploy, to mispronounce a name he knew perfectly well?) Have you sampled our vintage marc, Monsieur?”

  “Not yet.”

  Monsieur Gobfin summoned the waitress. “Elodie, some marc for the gentleman … No, not a shot, bring the decanter …” He hovered between the white tables, a yellow smile suspended between his sunken cheeks. A vague sense of embarrassment gathered with each passing second. “Something’s up,” thought D. “The bedbug’s being too friendly by half …” It was a relief when the amber-filled decanter arrived with its retinue of miniature glasses.

  “Let’s try some, then,” said D with composure. “But we must touch glasses together. Please sit down, Monsieur.”

  Monsieur Gobfin was only too pleased to accept. The hovering stopped. “If I may be so bold …” The opaque marbles that passed for his pupils probed the room; he sat down so as not to present his back to anyone. “No good lunch is complete without some old marc,” he said meditatively. “That’s what I always say. You be the judge.” At three paces he was no more than unpleasant-looking; at a foot and a half, he looked scrawny and tough, a withered skin stretched over a narrow skull. His personality emerged from a sickly, malevolent weakness. D felt himself observed from all angles and broken down by unknown methods. He glanced ostentatiously at his watch. “Oh, but if you’re in a hurry, Monsieur Battisti …” “No, not at all.” (If I let him go, I’ll never figure it out.)

  “The fact is, I’m quite perplexed,” Monsieur Gobfin began.

  D appeared to be astonished.