Katia also wanted to go back to France. We borrowed a car from a friend in the Belgian network and crossed the frontier clandestinely. To be honest, there wouldn’t have been any risk in my traveling under my real name, but I’d fled the country to live an illegal existence, and my personal documents were still hidden in the Rue des Jeûneurs laboratory. For Katia, on the other hand, the situation was even more complicated, since there was still a conviction hanging over her head like the sword of Damocles. When the Jeanson network had been broken up she ought, like all the others, to have been imprisoned awaiting trial but, thanks to her American nationality, she’d been temporarily released. Being under no illusion as to the likely verdict and sentence, we’d decided, together with Francis Jeanson, to get her out of the country immediately to Belgium via Switzerland and Germany. She’d crossed the borders with forged papers and wearing various wigs, since her photograph had been on the front page of the newspapers, notably in an article with the headline: “These are the Parisian Women of the FLN,”1 which described her as the network’s recruiting officer. Convicted in her absence, she was the only one of the women who’d been arrested who had managed to avoid ending up in Petite Roquette Prison.
I went back to the lab in Rue des Jeûneurs. I had continued to pay the rent through Marie-Aline, and M. Petit had profited from my prolonged absence by setting up an office in what had been my dining room. Seeing me return, he was afraid I’d insist that he leave. In fact the opposite was the case. The premises were spacious enough to allow him to stay, and I was both surprised and delighted to find that he’d been there to see that everything was kept in good order. I reactivated my firm, went back to being a photographer, found my boxes with their precious contents still intact. Katia and I moved into a small apartment, and I told my family, friends and clients that I was back.
There were two stories going around to explain my disappearance. Those who had been involved in the operation knew the truth. The others thought I’d gone to work for Agfa in Germany after I’d broken up with Marie-Aline, preferring to get away from Paris to give me time to forget her.
The weather was fine, it was summer. Paris, deserted by all those who went away on vacation, was quiet and left with its picture-postcard views. Fashion favored the urchin cut for girls and colorful trousers for the boys. The war, all the worries were behind us. I was glad to be back, to wander around the sunny streets, the embankments and the gardens, to immortalize the peaceful weeks with my camera.
But Katia was in a bad way. She was suffering from what I called the ‘depression of the ex-combatant’, the profound malaise to which I was unfortunately no stranger myself, since I too had been through it at the conclusion of every struggle. A clandestine period leaves indelible traces. It makes a deep impression on you and cannot simply be brushed away. When you’ve learned to live with fear, risked your life, your freedom, experienced dangerous and romantic adventures, always under pressure and dedicating your life to a cause you’ve decided is pure, becoming reintegrated in society can be a painful ordeal.
Katia found she couldn’t paint anymore nor feel emotion or be satisfied with simple things. She felt alone, useless. The euphoria mingled with fear, which is so characteristic in the underground, had vanished. Daily life seemed terribly insipid and futile. She was overwhelmed by melancholy.
It was no use my fussing over her, making every effort to think up things to comfort her, to cheer her up; nothing I could do or say made her feel any better.
In spite of our love, she couldn’t forget that Véra, her former lover, was still imprisoned in La Roquette and, given that her own situation was irregular, going to visit her was clearly out of the question.
She wouldn’t go out at all, refusing to be seen in her apathetic state, declined repeated invitations from her old friends, no longer went to the places where the surrealist painters used to meet. Determined to bear the burden of her melancholy alone, Katia drowned her torment deep in the whisky bottle; she couldn’t get to sleep until she’d drained it to the last drop.
I could understand her, but at the same time I realized my presence was no help to her. So I decided to shut myself away too, only in my laboratory. Work would be my therapy. I had projects for the future, personal ones this time. I intended to develop my own photos, the thousands of shots I’d taken since the Liberation. I planned to exhibit my works and to become—why not?—the artist my political commitment had never allowed me to be. My boxes were full of magnificent photos that were just waiting to be brought out. And then I was thirty-eight. My friends were beginning to make a name for themselves, each in his own field. Until then I’d never thought of a career; now I decided it was time.
But no sooner had I gotten back than the anti-Franco Spaniards, alerted to my return by mutual friends, came to see me. I’d already thought my past might catch up with me but had never imagined the respite would be so brief. I’d given some of their people a crash course before I left, and I’d hoped that would mean they’d be completely self-sufficient by now. But it’s not enough to be a good pupil to be a good forger. That means constant research because paper is changing all the time. Identity cards alone are not enough to allow someone to survive in the underground, which needs a whole pile of documents, from a driver’s license to proof of one’s address—say, a telephone or electricity bill.
Training courses had to be scheduled again and on a timetable that was pretty restrictive. José, the communist, Carlos, the Trotskyist and Juan, the anarchist, were all intelligent enough not to ask me where I’d been during the last two years, but because of their political differences they still refused to meet each other and work together. As far as I was concerned, I couldn’t wait to get the training of my apprentices completed as soon as possible so that I would be left in peace and above all, of course, so that their efforts could help rid Spain of the unsavory Franco. But, first and foremost, I no longer wanted to sacrifice my own freedom. That, at any rate, was my state of mind when I made the acquaintance of an extraordinary man whose destiny I was to share from that day onward for years to come.
It was a mid-September afternoon. By what chance I couldn’t say but—and this was very unusual—there were several clients visiting the laboratory at the same time, packed into the waiting room. The man in question was of medium height, broad-shouldered, slightly portly and with a huge black mustache, like the singer Georges Brassens. He’d been the first to arrive but no, he assured me, he wasn’t in a hurry and he politely insisted I see all the others first. He took out his newspaper and waited patiently in an armchair in my anteroom.
When we were alone together he stood up and held out his hand. “I’m Stéphane,” he said. “It’s Jeannette who sent me. I’d like to talk to you.”
That he should introduce himself with a first name would come from Jeannette, my former liaison agent, and that he straight away used the familiar ‘tu’ indicated that he belonged to the FLN support networks. I locked all the doors so that we could discuss serious matters.
Let me give you a brief description. ‘Stéphane’, Georges Mattéi by his real name, was in his thirties. Of Corsican origin, he came from a communist family that was active in the FTP Resistance group; he’d done his military service in Algeria, where the army had ‘taught him to kill’, then, like the others of his generation, he’d been recalled in order to ‘pacify’ Algeria. A convinced anti-militarist, spotted as a leader during the demonstrations of the men who’d been recalled, because he’d chanted his wish for peace in Algeria louder than the others, the military hierarchy sent him with the other ‘hard cases’ to the Great Kabylia combat zone. He witnessed torture that he attempted to expose when he got back by publishing an article entitled “Jours kabyles” (Kabylian days) in Les Temps modernes.
A journalist, close to Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and with a strong belief in liberty and equality, in 1969 he took charge of the escape routes for bags with the Curiel network, after the Jeanson network had been broken down.
The exceptional efficiency he showed meant that he became Henri Curiel’s right-hand man until the ceasefire.
Mattéi and I exchanged views on Algeria. He’d gone over there in 1962, to see what it was like, but he’d felt no desire to settle down there as a ‘Pied-rouge’.2 His opinion was that the reconstruction of Algeria was a matter for the Algerians and that to collaborate with them as a Frenchman gave him the unpleasant feeling of being part of a kind of disguised colonialism.
On many points we shared the same ideas, and we were concerned about the emergence of a current of religious fundamentalism. Despite everything, we were aware that a nation needed time to reconstruct its identity after a hundred and thirty years of colonization, and we were very hopeful about the future of the country.
He told me about the activities of the African liberation movements that now had their offices in Algiers and were supported by the Algerian government. From France, Curiel helped them through his organization, working in sympathy with them both legally and underground, and coordinating this was Stéphane’s responsibility. Though he had accepted the task enthusiastically, Mattéi refused to become part of Curiel’s group, on the one hand because he wanted to retain his independence, but also because of differences of opinion in political questions, especially after Curiel had come out in support of Ben Bella.3 After that, relations between them had cooled, though without bringing their collaboration to an end.
Moreover, Mattéi wasn’t focused on the African continent alone; he was equally concerned with promoting South American revolutionary struggles. During his first trip to Cuba in 1961 he’d made numerous contacts with South American revolutionary leaders, notably in Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, Chile and the Dominican Republic.
I liked this man with the mustache. He wasn’t pretentious, didn’t make a mystery of things or go on interminably about his activities. Not belonging to any political party, independent of all the networks—which reassured me all the more because, due to numerous unintentional pieces of carelessness, the support network for the FLN had broken all records for arrests—he was particularly distinguished by three qualities: he was serious, loyal and believed in universal human rights. He was so likable and had such a broad vision and extensive knowledge of international politics that we ended up talking until it got dark. Of course I was well aware he hadn’t come to see me so that we could draw up a list of struggles for emancipation throughout the world, but he was polite enough not to rush things. It was only when it was getting late that he explained that he’d just come back from the Dominican Republic, which was going through a very serious political crisis. Hardly had the new democratic regime been established, following thirty years of a cruel dictatorship, than it was overturned by a military coup. The country was being torn apart by war. The leaders who were highest on the wanted list had had to flee. The revolutionaries were rushing to the mountainous bush to organize the armed struggle. The military promised to execute anyone who opposed the new dictatorship. In order to survive, to flee or to fight, they needed papers.
I agreed to help the Dominicans without hesitation, but I made it a point of honor to see that everything was clear between Stéphane and me, for there were a certain number of conditions that had to be respected. I insisted that I should have just one contact (himself), that I should be kept absolutely separate from the organization, and I warned him that I wouldn’t accept a request from any intermediary or emissary, whoever he might be. Telephone contact was to be strictly avoided or at least kept to an absolute minimum. We would see each other at the laboratory. In order to avoid the risk of being arrested if the police should happen to have put a tap on the phone, any call to arrange a rendezvous in the town had to use a quarter-hour code to indicate an interval of three hours and one or two days: a rendezvous at midday meant three pm, at six pm meant nine o’clock; ‘a quarter to’ meant the preceding day; ‘half past’, two days after the stated date. In addition to that, if he should have a meeting with anyone in these networks, he must never come to see me on the same day. And then—this was the most important of my conditions—there was to be no question of money between us. I categorically refused to accept any payment and reserved the right to say yes or no to every request. If I were to have the least doubt about the merits of any request, I wouldn’t carry out the work.
Since Mattéi also took the liberty of saying yes or no to those he was working for, I never had to say no to him.
Initially I’d assumed Mattéi would only call on my services occasionally, but I very quickly had to face up to the fact that I was wrong in that. People all over the world were fighting for their freedom. After the Dominicans and the Haitians, it was the Brazilians’ turn to come under the yoke of a military dictatorship in 1964. Then, in 1966 following the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, during which the Latin American Solidarity Organization (LASO) was formed, Mattéi agreed to become the organizer of their clandestine support network for the revolutionary struggles operating from France. Under the aegis of LASO the revolutionary movements in Argentina, Venezuela, Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay and Chile worked together for the revolution in Latin America, but in opposition to the Moscow line.
So gradually all these countries were added to my list, but that wasn’t all since Mattéi, through the Curiel network, was also aiding the anti-apartheid movements in South Africa. Then there was Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Angola, Portuguese colonies that were fighting for their independence. In 1967 Mattéi linked up with American pacifist groups refusing to serve in Vietnam. Since it was precisely because I didn’t want to be part of the war in Indo-China that I’d left the French secret service, I could well understand them and immediately offered to supply forged papers to all American deserters who wanted them. I have to say that there were a lot of them.
Thus it was that in that year, 1967, I was supplying forged papers to combatants and draft-dodgers in fifteen different countries, and that was nothing compared with subsequent years, up to 1971.
It goes without saying that resuming my activity as a forger, especially at that rate, meant the end of my artistic ambitions. Refusing to be paid by the organizations, I had to find another way of making a living. Photographer by day, forger by night, my firm’s accounts always in the red, I had a devil of a job doing the books at the end of the month. And my personal and family life was still in the same mess. Very often I couldn’t keep my promise to take my children out for a walk on the weekend, and I could never explain what the reason was, even though I knew they’d waited hours for me. Since I had thousands of secrets I couldn’t divulge, I spoke as little as possible to avoid inventing too many lies I might get tied up in. Katia, cured of her depression, had finally left. Later on I got to know Lia Lacombe, Peter Schaeffer’s assistant at the ORTF,4 with whom I moved into a new apartment on Rue Charles-Baudelaire. But, once again, my nocturnal activities meant I couldn’t meet her expectations. My love life’s always been full of misunderstandings, but with Lia the situation reached the depths. I was working—she thought I was sleeping around. And since I had no way of putting her mind at rest, nor of letting her in on the secret, even if only to protect her, it was impossible to get the idea out of her head that I was in the arms of another woman while she was waiting for me until the small small hours, eyes brimming with tears and full of reproaches. I would tell her I was working on my exhibition, yet she never saw a single negative.
It’s also true that when I was with her, my mind was often elsewhere. Though not where she imagined. I remember one day when my silence made her explode: “I’ve been talking to you for half an hour but you’re just looking into space, you don’t reply. Where are you?”
My reply was laconic: “In Angola.”
“You’ve been seeing an Angolan woman?”
Scenes, arguments, tears and misunderstandings.
My secrets invariably led to this kind of problem. I never managed to reconcile my love life with my illegal activities, except when my partners w
ere involved in the networks themselves. What’s more, working day and night, I was always broke, I never took a holiday, I was never free. To be honest, I wasn’t a good catch.
“You never thought of giving it all up?”
To tell you the truth, there were times when I was weary of all these sacrifices, weary of all the acrobatics I had to go through, of all the sleepless nights to pay the bills, of only sleeping in two-hour slots, of always being on the alert and checking that I wasn’t being followed, of being unable to enjoy the company of my children, of making the women who loved me suffer—out of love—always imprisoned in the extreme solitude of my secrets. But I only had to think, even just for a second, of all the unknown men and women whose lives were in my hands, to immediately stop feeling sorry for myself. My love life, my career, my comfort and my pleasures were much less important than saving a life in danger—because the memory of the helping hand of the agents of the 6th section, who had saved me from certain death when I was being persecuted myself, was engraved on my memory forever.
Lia was sulking. It didn’t make her any less beautiful. I’d just told her I was having to cancel the weekend in the country we’d planned. She switched on the radio “because of all this deafening silence between us,” she moaned, though I think that above all she wanted news of the demonstrations. It was May 1968 and her son Pascal, about twenty, was taking part in them. The radio reported the confrontations. The young students were chanting poetic slogans while throwing cobblestones for sexual liberation, and that was great. The workers were setting up more and more pickets all around France, and that interested me even more.
Adolfo Kaminsky Page 16