I'm Dying Laughing

by Christina Stead

  Madame after a moment said gently, ‘Well, now, reciprocate. Tell me what you think of me, and why you ask me questions about myself.’

  Emily struggled, ‘Eh, bien Madame Suzanne, vooz ate not amie, you have become our friend and because I heard some hints—what’s that, good God in French?—I felt all the time this great vacuum, not knowing exactly what nameless and terrible things, shows terrible, had passed in your life—well, I can’t say it in Frenc—what painful and awful times your life has encompassed; yet, because I know you and you are part of us, we have dinner with you, you know our children, you are ours as contrasted with the purple anonyme general, the anonymous vague general people; and in spite of the pain of remembering, in spite of the honter freeson, I mean the shameful shuddering away from (God knows what I’m saying Madame Suzanne, vows comprenez?)the sufferings and heroism of those people I don’t know are less pressing—you might say honestly I don’t care any more for the sufferings of people one never saw or cared for, they’re not real sufferings, they are fetts diverses, but because of knowing you, and knowing you have been through all that, I feel—somehow strange, terrible, very ill, even guilty. Vous me comprenez, n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘Je vous comprends parfaitement,’ said Suzanne.

  Emily paused and said, ‘I shrink, Suzanne, terribly from this knowledge. I don’t know what will be the consequences of knowing.’

  ‘I must say, if your French is very inadequate, I understand your feelings,’ said Suzanne.

  ‘I feel a positive horror, a fear to know these things and to know that these things happened to someone I see with my own eyes and my own children see with their eyes; and my husband sees with his eyes. It happened to someone whose voice I know, whose eyes are watching me. My God! My God!’

  Madame Suzanne said, looking at her with wide-open eyes, ‘It’s bizarre. You, too, give me a sense of horror and yet I felt none then, except at any given moment. Is it because you are a writer?’

  Emily continued, ‘This afternoon, just before I am to meet Vittorio, this famous man and hero—’

  She paused a moment, looking questioningly at Suzanne, who was non-committal. Emily continued, ‘I feel this reluctance, this shuddering and, at the same time, a sense of duty, is it? Of being forced? So I must know, it seems to me, what you suffered. Will you tell me please? Tell me in French, as part of the lesson.’

  ‘Well, I know you have heard many accounts. You were a journalist, you went and interviewed widows of miners and of men dead in accidents, orphans, all kinds of people, so I am not going to tell you sad stories. Besides, it’s not my way and it’s not of importance. These are realities. No need for window-dressing.’

  Stephen was called away at this moment for a telephone conversation and he did not return. His French was better than Emily’s but he would not study and he resented Madame Gagneux.

  Emily said, ‘Yes, Suzanne, I understand. Oh, go on, hurry, I can’t wait to know. Tell me before Stephen returns. Do you see, tonight I am going to meet people who know about you; or if not you, the life you led and I am outside. Je suis dehors.’

  Emily looked at Suzanne, thinking about her. She wished that Stephen would return. Madame Suzanne was perhaps ten years older than Emily, poorly dressed, as always, (and perhaps for that he doesn’t like her, thought Emily), an intellectual, surely, with fine half-grey hair in waves, her face solid, dark-eyed, if not handsome. They were what Stephen called scornfully, ‘no-doubt-soulful-eyes.’ They were large, dark eyes quite startling in what Stephen called her ‘pasty, meaty face’.

  Emily declared she was beautiful: Stephen found something detestable in her. Suzanne was saying, ‘And tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, you must prepare a speech for me, all about your life in Hollywood. Have you your notebook, Madame Howard?’

  Emily said, ‘I feel ashamed to write notes about the words in a story of this sort.’

  Suzanne smiled, ‘Oh, this is quite unimportant. As I no doubt mentioned, I was a member of two underground groups, one for the hiding of Jewish children from the Nazis, the other the demolition squad for the actifs, Resistants on active service. Good.’

  ‘Ah? Good,’ said Emily.

  ‘I had a war name: we all did. Mine was Mademoiselle Marie-Charlotte Broun. Of course, I had false papers and a baptism certificate. I am atheist from childhood. From 1940 to 1944 I hid 2,134 Jewish children and I lost fourteen of these children.’

  ‘What do you mean by lost?’

  ‘By lost I mean, fourteen of these hidden with families were discovered by the Nazis and transported to a crematorium where they were changed into burned bones and ashes. Of these, nine were under ten years old. The other five were between ten and twelve. After the war was over, I helped in the work of returning the children to their parents, if there were parents. You see this was very hard; just as hard as before; and then I had to tell them, myself, some of them, about the lost ones. It was my duty; I could not blame others. Returning the children was not easy. Many years had passed; some could not remember their parents, they loved their foster-parents. They had to pass as non-Jews of course and did not know they were Jews. One, for example, had to be sent to a distant uncle in the Argentine. I criticize no one. For the Jews, nearly extirpated as a race, these lost treasures, a grandson, a nephew, these were treasures, you see. I understand. But it was very hard, for those who had put their own lives in danger and fed and loved the little ones during those years. You are crying. I do not cry. There were so many hard things. It is no use. It is all very hard.’

  Emily looked at the woman before her. ‘It is simply strange and wonderful. How could you have had the courage to do it?’

  ‘Oh, in the first place, I look like so many other people. And then we found we could all do it. There were times—I’ll go into that later. I was plastered all over the walls as Mademoiselle Marie-Charlotte Broun you know. The Germans knew my pseudonym, my work with Jewish children and the demolition squads. But I take a very bad photograph. I look like others.’

  ‘What did you do on the demolition squad?’ said Emily looking timidly at the dumpy grey-haired woman, whose voice was tired now.

  ‘Oh, I organized, helped get explosives. I was in a sector where, frankly, there was not much of that. The population was not very enthusiastic. There were such sections, especially near German head-quarters, and apart from general and special regulations such as special curfews, the Germans were not too bad to the population. It is a pity to say it, but mere truth, that some people got used to living with them, living as a sort of serf or client. I was in a not very heroic section, like that. At the end, just before the end, our chief was sent to Buchenwald and died there, a professor of mathematics at a college. I must tell you it was not only us, though. There were complete strangers who helped in an emergency. Once I had a list of eleven Jewish children in my handbag. The Gestapo came and started a search of the café where I was sitting, waiting for someone. They searched the woman next to me, found nothing. She was completely unknown to me. I got up to go, leaving my handbag on the seat next to her. They stopped me and searched me and she had taken and hidden my handbag; and when they went she gave it back.’

  Emily, after a silence, said, ‘My heavens, this is a wonderful, terrible story. Yet the way you say it, it is not exactly spectacular; they would not put it in the movies. So this is Europe 1948. Most people have lived through something like it. So this is Europe 1948.’

  ‘No doubt of that,’ said Suzanne.

  ‘How strange it all seems. I look around and think, the Germans have been here, climbed this staircase, bought at this shop, this wheelbarrow has been used to transport their goods. This man in denims has worked for them; these streets were their streets. I think this and hate them. How I hate them! I hate them that they were here in Paris with German lettering on the Opera. How did it happen? It’s so hard to understand.’

  After a few more minutes of conversation, Emily said, ‘I don’t know if my French is improving, Suzanne
, but I understand so much better.’

  ‘It’s because you want to understand and you want to say something. Strength of expression gives grammar. You will learn French. I do not think Mr Howard will learn it so easily. I read your fine book, Madame Howard, and I think this was a fine, forceful work. Vittorio lent it to me.’

  Emily jumped up from her end of the table and came to throw her arms round Suzanne’s shoulders, ‘Oh, Suzanne, you encourage me. I need it. I have so much writing-for-money to do. But hope is in Europe, where values are different, where heroism is part of the human heart. I really hope to write the good books I have in my heart. A writer is his work, isn’t he?’

  Madame Suzanne began collecting her papers and books, ‘No, a writer is his relation to society. You know that someone wrote contemptuously about Gustave Flaubert or the Goncourts, I forget which, ‘Si le bouquin marche, tout marche.’ They didn’t care; they wrote. This at a moment when men, literary men, jewellers, bakers and shoe-makers were dying for the Commune.’

  Emily said, ‘You depress me: this is depressing.’

  Suzanne smiled, ‘Alas, most of the writers I admired before the war, proved to be poor creatures during the occupation and some of the actors too. Cheer up! What has that to do with you? You cannot answer for me or them; I cannot answer for you. All is to be tried out again, every time again. There is no fatality, nothing sure; you will be all right. I leave it to you.’

  Emily got up from the table, ‘If only we could be sure of ourselves. How difficult it is! How can we be sure? I don’t know how I’d behave.’

  Suzanne said, ‘Everyone asks himself that question; and no one knows.’

  Emily had some things to do herself. She had no time to change, and for dinner and most of the evening she wore her afternoon costume, a pair of short blue linen trousers, tight and somewhat faded, over this a blue butcher’s smock over a turtle neck sweater over a white silk blouse; and a blue ribbon off a chocolate box tying her hair into a top-knot. From time to time she adjusted in her water-fall of hair, little combs which did not hold it. There was her very red and yellow face smiling, her naturally light-red lips, her bright blue eyes, rounded and wide open. Stephen looking at her, smiled, as others did; her costume was comic, original and becoming. The blouse, intended for a short, solid, rotund butcher, covered her large bosom and thick waist. She had put on a lot of weight. When Vittorio was announced she felt a qualm. She ought to have put on a dress. The Europeans like women feminine. Stephen’s argument against Madame Suzanne was that she wasn’t feminine; she didn’t try to appeal to the male. There in fact was Suzanne in a black dress, unfeminine, looking stolid, not the romantic heroine; and there was she, a butcher-boy. The door opened and Vittorio walked in, with a red-and-white smile. Speaking in a bubbling, happy voice he came towards her, holding out a large bunch of pink roses in white paper, his glasses sticking out of his breast pocket. He kissed her plump, dimpled hand.

  ‘I have just come from a meeting, dear Madame. These are for you. You see how I have come.’

  He had not shaved, his small, sparse, reddish whiskers could be seen. He was uncommonly ugly, half-blind, half-deaf. His voice, when not shouting, was a chirping, reassuring, cooing, cozening, honeyed song, warm and hurrying; and when he wanted to explain something, he shouted. He was as confident as a much-loved child, went quickly to and fro in the room and, if he did not know what to do, he at once asked, in an agreeable, friendly, but self-reliant way; there was a very faint hint that if he was at a loss, his host was at fault. He greeted Suzanne with real enthusiasm. He was early. Emily wished she had asked more people. The room seemed hollow. The echoing green, she said to herself; and no more to be seen on the echoing green.

  ‘The echoing green,’ she said to Stephen, laughing as she turned to the drinks tray and began to fill the cocktail shaker with cracked ice, gin and vermouth. ‘It just came into my head. I used to stay awake at night when I needed sleep,’ (she continued to her guests) ‘reciting the poems I knew. In one afternoon I learned 110 poems straight out of the anthology we had to study. I bet I was the only one went to the examination room with those 110 poems by heart.’

  Vittorio said, laughing:

  ‘Such such were the joys,

  When we all, girls and boys

  In our youth time were seen,

  On the Echoing Green.’

  ‘Oh, Vittorio, what is that?’ said Emily in surprise, turning to him and coming over with the cocktail shaker in her hand. She poured his drink first.

  ‘Why you know, of course, it is William Blake. I was at a cultural conference only a few months ago in which he was attacked by an English writer; and I got up and said he knew nothing at all about Blake. And so did others, I assure you. He is considered a very great poet on the continent. All the Songs of Innocence are so simply purely music’

  He held up his glass and drank with his scarred but smiling eyes to Emily. ‘But I am so tired, I am wandering,’ he said.

  ‘Imagine you knowing it so well. You put us to shame,’ said Emily.

  He smiled, ‘But you must know The Gadfly by Voynich. A woman, you know, is the author. The man is disfigured and the man and woman only recognize each other, though they never are sure, after many years, by means of some stanzas of Blake’s.’ The stanzas go:

  “Am I not a fly like thee?

  Or art thou not a man like me?

  For I dance and drink and sing,

  Till some blind hand shall brush my wing.

  If thought is life and strength and breath

  And the want of thought is death;

  Then am I a happy fly

  If I live or if I die.”

  Emily said, with eyes sparkling with tears, ‘I feel so ashamed; you know it a hundred times better than I do.’

  Vittorio said, ‘But you create it. I am only a consumer—though I have written some plays and one philosophical story’; and he went on to tell the story, which Emily described as purely dialectical but diabolically amusing. It was a true story of a society without lawyers, which had trial by ordeal. The ordeal was to exhaust your opponent by extemporizing verses in a public assembly. Vittorio said:

  ‘But Palambron called down a Great Solemn Assembly, That he who will not defend Truth, may be compelled to Defend a Lie, that he may be snared and caught and taken’

  and he laughed.

  Emily, flabbergasted, said nothing. He went on talking. He advised Emily to read Diderot’s The Blind Girl, to go back to Voltaire, to read the memoirs of Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse. He told her Marx was full of ideas and explanations of things for literary people: that St Just was an expert in political psychology. Socialist literature was full of the most exquisite masterpieces, sealed in silence, rarely translated. He mentioned the novel about Auguste Blanqui, L’Enfermé, the man perpetually in prison; others. Emily, listening passionately, with eager, inflamed face, her hair blowing in the invisible air currents of the room, and the breezes of her own ardent life, declared she was going to read every one of them, a new life had come to her; ‘I have been looking for a new road and this is it. How you help me!’ Stephen listened too; but as if it were a play and with a satiric expression. Vittorio seemed unconscious of his drawbacks. Stephen smiled a little sourly. He was relieved when Mernie Wauters was announced. Wauters was a dark man in his mid-thirties, slender, stooping, a little above middle height, sallow, with liquid brown eyes under well-curved eyebrows, and a poignant, expressionless, sick face, which some woman had called soulful. Wauters was a successful businessman. He and Madame Suzanne knew each other well.

  ‘He was my associate in the Resistance,’ said Suzanne.

  ‘Old warriors reunited,’ said Stephen ironically.

  Stephen felt restless. Suzanne was shabby, Vittorio shabby and un-shaved and Wauters looked like a foreigner, a Jew, a Pole. Emily was finding a rich flavour in this assortment; her love of adventure, her natural courage, her old training made this assembly appeal to her. But this flotsam an
d jetsam of war, occupation and near-revolution made Stephen feel untidy. He had come to Europe for peace and quiet, peaceful vindication. He had always detested Bohemia. However, he showed nothing of this. He had a natural pleasantness of manner which deceived even other charmers, he was the perfect master of the house.

  Emily, though knowing his feelings, suppressed her animal spirits, her ready affections and tempers, when she could, and made the soft lights and music play around him. It was his house, she loved him, he was her child and her husband, a man who had been sick and given up a fortune for the revolution; who had placed himself on a level where he might meet a woman like her, had rejoiced in her, been her great stroke of luck. She never forgot this.

  Now observing his mood, she said to herself, I must not spend the whole evening admiring Vittorio. She swung away from Vittorio to Wauters, who was talking to Madame Suzanne, with her life-knowing, plain air. Emily thought to herself, I’ll get her some kind of a dress, and Stephen will like her better. And it’s that wiry hair looks like a touch of the tar-brush, Negro or Algerian or something. Could I do something about her hair? And if Stephen likes her better, he will learn French easier and we can have the kind of company in this house in which he is really happy.

  She thought this with a wise smile playing round her mobile and rather thin lips, and meantime listened to what was being said. Suzanne and Monsieur Wauters were, to Stephen’s discontent, exchanging reminiscences about the Resistance. She thought, ‘This is dull. It can’t go on all the evening. Perhaps Vittorio is my best bet after all.’

  She said to Mernie Wauters, ‘But tell us one of your stories. I know you tell wonderful stories.’

  She handed round some more cocktails though they were getting watery; and went back to the table to fill the cocktail shaker. This time to liven the party she put in so much gin, so little Vermouth, that Stephen called warningly, Emily! Emily! With a pretty grimace, she took no notice and went around filling glasses.