by Paul Nizan
On the third day in the evening, when he found himself alone at Port-Royal with his iron bed and the secrets cupboard, Simon decided it was finally time to study the padlock: it took him two minutes to find the keyword, which was Siam. In barracks like this, almost everything is ruled by words from colonial expeditions and famous Great War battles: flags, messes, squadrooms, soldiers’ clubs with stencilled decorations, State secrets – all can be discovered by the same methods as the solutions to crosswords and riddles.
Next day the other secretary, who had relatives in the Pas-de-Calais, went off on leave: with Dietrich out of the way, Simon was sure of being left alone in the evening for three days. At one of those dead hours between the end of supper and the desolate notes of lights out – when the squadrooms are empty, and the men are loafing along the boulevards, outside the cafés or in the amusement halls on Avenue des Gobelins – Simon opened the cupboard. There was no chance of seeing Sergeant-Major Giudici or Major Sartre arrive on the scene.
The cupboard was half-full of files whose folders bore the title ‘Confidential’ or ‘Secret’ written in roundhand. Simon had no difficulty in discovering the only important item, which was the defence plan for Area 2. It was a notebook which, with extreme baldness, evoked war, revolution, civil strife. This administrative anticipation of such cataclysms was sufficiently poetic for Simon to be affected by its calligraphic presentation of the future: he dreamed for five minutes over the blazing pictures of Paris that rose from every line, and began to copy the instructions in the notebook. At the Choisy-le-Roi waterworks, so many men, he read. At Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, so many machine-guns. At the Gare de Lyon, so many troops from the 21st Colonial regiment. He saw the Army occupy the strategic points of Paris, he heard commands echo back and forth in the silence of great historical tempests, the muffled breathing of the Parisians as they peered through the slats of their shutters at the menacing streets, without cars, without lamps, at night. Lights-out checked him.
Next day Simon resumed his work, and on the third day he sent Rosenthal what he had already copied – going to the Champs-Elysées to mail the letter. On the evening of the third day, the office door opened. Simon, who had forgotten to lock himself in, pushed back his chair and stood to attention. Major Sartre, who had left his gloves behind in the office that morning, came in. Simon really did look guiltier than he ought to have: the Major, though not good at reading faces, could make no mistake. Sensing that something was going on, he looked around him and noticed the open door of the secrets cupboard.
What most troubled Simon’s officers was not perceiving the reasons which could have impelled him to copy secret documents. The Major had lodged Simon in prison the same evening, and this decision gave his commanding officers time for reflection. A worker would at once have been suspected of espionage and romantic links with Germany or with Moscow. But Simon? Lieutenant-Colonel de Lesmaes, who had learned of his former secretary’s escapade, asked the Major:
— Well, can you please explain to me then, Major, what a young man from Simon’s background, a former student at the Ecole des Chartes who, as we know, has never bothered himself with politics, could find interesting about the Paris defence plan!
The battalion commander raised his arms and said:
— This business is quite beyond me, Sir. I don’t have the faintest idea.
Simon in his regimental prison was waiting to be interrogated: he felt as though he had reverted to school age, saw himself being questioned by a colonel/headmaster, a major/deputy-head, flabbergasted that so good a pupil should have provoked a scandal. He was thinking how people have very primitive ideas about a man, and how his action must seem obscure to them because it did not fit in with any notion a career officer could form of a well-bred soldier. At last he was interrogated: the Colonel appeared much more embarrassed than he. When he was asked:
— Come now, Simon, tell us whether there was anybody behind you. Bad influences? A woman?
Simon understood that he could say no and would be believed. Military equality is a façade, in the name of which a person initially forgives the excesses of discipline in the belief that he is at least in the same boat as all the others – but such illusions do not withstand three months in barracks. Simon sensed from the tone of his officers that social complicities were capable of keeping all the Army’s written laws at bay. He divined that they would reason like confessors, or like readers of detective stories, and that he could doubtless trick them.
Silence struck him as a manifest duty: there was no question of betraying Rosenthal. He did not feel noble: he was still at school, where you never tell on anybody. He was rather afraid his former friendship with Rosenthal would be discovered, and in this way a connection made with some revolutionary group: he was wrong to be worried, the inquiry carried out by military means had come up with nothing; it had been learned only that he did not meddle in politics, had no suspicious relationships or financial needs. Sergeant-Major Giudici had said nothing about the dubious associations in which he had himself involved Simon. The information reaching the barracks spoke only of his virtues.
Simon finally took a risk, telling himself that his version was going to seem a bit crude. He explained to the Colonel that his curiosity about military matters was keen, and that he had not been able to resist the temptation to cast a glance at the plans it was his mission to protect; the proximity of these documents had suggested to him the idea of composing a futuristic novel, for which he was taking notes at the moment when the major had surprised him; he was desperately sorry about this childishness, upon whose consequences he had not reckoned.
— But in that case, exclaimed the Colonel, why didn’t you speak earlier? Your silence allowed every kind of conjecture!
Simon, who had just caught the look which Major Sartre had exchanged with the Colonel, told himself the battle was won. This explanation, which would have seemed absurd from a soldier of any other background, actually struck them as acceptable.
— I was afraid of seeming ridiculous, Sir, said Simon, and I thought you wouldn’t believe me. It seemed to me I could defend myself only by keeping quiet.
This yarn corresponded pretty closely to the idea the officers had of the man. The invention of a novel seemed to them to fit in well with the daydreams they associated with all intellectuals, in their conviction that they were themselves men of action. They breathed again, now that they were presented with a version of the incident that contradicted none of their values. It made them smile, and the Colonel told Simon that he had behaved like a child and that one cannot hide one’s head in the sand. He was asked to give his word of honour that nothing had left the barracks: he gave this forthwith, and added that he had only just begun taking notes when the Major came in. He considered that his friendship with Bernard was worth any lie. Honour played so natural a role in the moral habits of Simon’s officers that it never crossed their minds that a lad like him could perjure himself. They would perhaps not have taken the word of a worker’s son, but Simon deceived them with the greatest of ease.
Since it was not possible for his indiscretion to go unpunished, he was sentenced to a fortnight’s imprisonment with a week in solitary, which on passing upwards to the higher echelons of the military hierarchy became a month’s imprisonment with a fortnight in solitary. He concluded that he was getting off lightly and that Gladys would not have long to weep over him.
Rosenthal, who had had no news of Simon since the dispatch of the first information, quickly grew worried. He thought of rushing to the Lourcine barracks, but reflected that if André had got himself caught, all visits would be suspect. He went and prowled about outside the barrack gates, on Boulevard de Port-Royal, at the hour when the unemployed wait in front of the guardroom for the soldiers to finish their evening meal, but he did not see Simon come out. He was convinced that all was lost. If ill, Simon would have made some arrangement to warn him. The
se anxieties gave him an exhilarating idea of the Conspiracy. When he saw Laforgue, he explained to him that everything must have been discovered.
— That poor fellow’s going to be doing time, said Laforgue. Unless I’m much mistaken, it must be a court-martial affair.
— I know Simon, said Bernard, he won’t open his mouth. They won’t suspect a thing.
— It wasn’t you I was thinking about, said Laforgue.
— How sentimental you are, answered Rosenthal.
The idea of danger excited him: for a few days, he felt alive, he thought about plots in Italian cities, about a world of conspiracies, police and music. He believed that police-detectives were following him and hid Simon’s notes. But nothing happened: the policemen were always only passers-by.
His term of imprisonment completed, Simon renewed his acquaintance with the Clignancourt barracks, to which he had been sent back by the Paris Garrison. It was the beginning of June, the weather was quite perfect. On his first day of freedom, he wandered about in the barrack yard between the stables and the showers, from one end to the other of that crazy military planet, listening to the bugle calls whose meaning he had already forgotten. For one day more, high iron gates and grindstone-grit walls separated him from the world: long did he watch through the slats of the little guardroom gate as life’s strange parade – workers, bare-headed girls, tramps, lorries, open trucks and women pushing baby-carriages alongside the flowering acacias of the Circle railway – passed by. On the other side of the yard lay the poor suburbs, with their meagre whisps of smoke, their flowering shrubs sprouting from the signs of secondhand dealers, restaurant advertisements, African huts of corrugated iron, planks and cardboard; dishevelled girls trudged through the white spring dust, their stockings round their ankles, and half-naked children played with old bicycle wheels on ground covered with loose stones, rubble, charred rags, empty cans and bed springs; the sad native land of the Parisians was studded with the black steeples of chimney stacks. For the first time for months, Simon went to bed that evening in the squadroom; all night long an indistinct pink light persisted on the far side of the casements. The squadroom woke at dawn with sighs and sounds of coughing. Simon’s neighbour sat on his bed and from a piece of green baize took out an orchestral trumpet; he sounded an imaginary reveille, and played a waltz to which the men listened, dazed from sleep and lost beneath the squadroom’s high ceiling. Simon told his neighbour that he played well; the soldier, who had a friendly manner, replied that he was called Di Maio and that he was soloist in a jazz band, and he took from his wallet a photo in which three young men and a woman grouped around a jazz drum-kit stared fixedly ahead of them; the skin of the bass drum bore this inscription, under a painted garland: ‘The Select’s Jazz’.
— That’s my brothers and a girl friend, said Di Maio. We do the dance-halls in the 13th. Do you know them?
Simon looked at the musicians’ dinner-jackets and the beaded dress of the woman, who reminded him of Gladys.
— Yes, I know them, he said. Before going to gaol, I was at Lourcine, with the 23rd. That’s my neighbourhood.
Thus it was that Simon, even before he was back among the men, had fallen once again among the ambiguous charms of the Gobelins district.
Simon went to see Rosenthal and told him of the tragic events regarding the defence plan. Bernard reproached him for not having taken more rigorous precautions.
— Your information was first class, he said. Now it’s incomplete.
— Forgive me, replied Simon, I’m not cut out for plots.
— That’s a pity, said Bernard.
X
Extracts from a Black Notebook
* * *
Saw Rosenthal and several of his friends. Unbearable, of course, givers of lessons. Growing old: I find all young people detestable. But I envy their sense of irresponsibility and improvisation. At their age, I was fighting a war, every instant of my time was taken up by the most absurd duties.
Idea that command was our absolute due. Our mistake. Wartime command never justifies the responsibilities of civilian command. Don’t confuse command and government. Idiocy of the Horizon-Blue Chamber, Italians transforming regret for command into legitimation of government. Government is effected through politeness, flattery, knowledge of the private aspirations of the governed, persuasion. Because we believed in the rhetoric about efficiency, we all lost our bearings. Not our class. Escape from one’s class is a phenomenon possible in peacetime. Little normaliens putting out journals are seeking their bearings too; they’ll find them in the great disorders that are on the way. Not us, that’s over.
Adventures. I’ve had them: Verdun, Gallipoli. It was war and its wonderful disorder, blood, hunger, women, states of consciousness almost unimaginable in peacetime, luck. P. said to me: ‘Why on earth should surrealism interest me? I’ve had more violent spiritual experiences on the Somme.’ I haven’t the least idea what meaning our adventures had, all the keys are missing, but I’ve got a bad liver and rheumatism and, after all that stinking gelatinous mass of death, life is insipid. We’ve put the war behind us, we’ve put everything behind us. Yet we expect new fortunes. Or should we take refuge in discreetly metaphysical systems: radicalism, or the League of Nations, or nationalism? Weariness. We shall be pretty decrepit ten years from now.
* * *
Impossibility of leaving Simone, or even, for the moment, of deceiving her. Oh! to win women, as at the age of twenty-five, for the pleasure of prevailing; discovering the mechanisms that undo them all; being reborn. But those dances in front of the female, the warbling, the strutting, the conversations about them and about me, the fabrication of what they expect – it all bores me. I feel myself superior to all the versions of myself they might imagine. Simone would want to avenge herself – for the sake of dignity and a sense of justice, or retaliation – for the broken contracts. I’d lose her. But I’ve been living like this for seven years: I’d lose myself. No way out: deceiving a woman in order not to feel oneself grow old, in order to make a new start; fearing to do so, in order not to lose seven years, ten years of one’s life. Love is like a career: once one has arrived, is one to serve apprenticeships again, start again from zero?
Write the story of a man faithful because he fears death, a man unfaithful for the same reason.
Women never give the men they love holidays. Where should we go, if houses of pleasure did not exist? Young people are really lucky.
* * *
For want of anything better, one can imagine remarkable destinies. For want of anything better: at thirty-five, one has only one destiny left. One is neither a phoenix, nor a snake that changes its skin. The great temptation is to translate these daydreams about possible worlds into reality, to orient lives, to propose examples, to have influence. I wonder whether Stendhal was tempted. He must have been far too tough. In any case, a virile man almost never writes to you – always adolescents, women, failures, as if the writer could tell the future, console, avenge. How wearisome when one is neither God nor priest, like that father confessor Duhamel or that pastor Gide. Nothing will replace real holds.
Nothing is a better preparation for literature than wars. All peaces are Stendhalian.
* * *
About young men, in Scheler’s Vom Umsturz der Werte:
In certain psychoses, for example in hysteria, a kind of altruism is found whereby the patient can no longer live or feel by himself and constructs his experience on the basis of another’s, as a function of the perception, expectation or reaction which that other may have in any given circumstances . . . Sometimes a collective illusion even occurs, as in the pre-war Russian intelligentsia, particularly among the university youth, in whom thirst for sacrifice and flight from self, both of them morbid, by assuming a dimension of moral heroism inspired political or social goals.
* * *
Rosen tell
s me about his ‘plan’. Stupid, ineffective, forever improvised, but how bored those young men must be! He’d like me to give him my blessing, it’s very odd. He argues about espionage in general, about ‘conspiratorial values’, about the significance and the ambivalence of actions, he attempts to justify his undertaking instead of seeking out its real motives or consequences. Like everybody. Fear of motivation always did encourage justification. But these young men couldn’t care less about the correctness, the congruence of their justifications. I tell Rosen:
— Your justification of this whole business strikes me as quite arbitrary.
He laughs, it’s clear he thinks I’m a fool, and answers:
— Never mind that, we’ll find you others! Our attitude to action is like that of Epicurus to celestial physics, we don’t give a damn about hypotheses.
Since, however, he is exceedingly careful and timid, well brought up, he wants someone to tell him that such and such a piece of spying is not repugnant, but noble instead. Why not? He’s pleased with me. Fortunately, I’ve nothing to worry about: they’ll only dream.
Growing old means (among other things, all less serious) finding it indispensable to verify hypotheses: what then appears most worthy of oneself is a justification of action capable of surviving the man justified. Ill omen: you worry about the chances for eternity of the values for which you live, you’re ripe for God. Or for the inevitability of communism’s great future.
No one accepts his fate. But one makes shift.
Novel. How to describe a mutable man or world with means effective enough to give one’s description a chance of durability? Let’s give up writing. But one’s not wise at all, one believes in books, in children, one lives as though the world didn’t even have to come to an end.
What bothers me is not just having to die, but the idea that one day there will be absolutely no more men. Is it then necessary to come thus far in history only the better to leap into annihilation?