Now, while I had succeeded in obtaining the data for the main part of the report (the entrance exams and programme of studies), as well as for its historical part (the history of Romance language studies and the famous professors), and indeed on these subjects had more material than I knew what to do with, I had no information, absolutely none at all, about any interesting or distinguished students, and God knows I had done my best. I’d pestered everyone with questions, I’d tried to find the right contacts – nothing. I was directed straight back to the department, every time – here to this very office, where all the records were. So I would be most obliged, and naturally my superiors would also be grateful, if the department would kindly make the relevant records available to me.
The secretaries in the dean’s office gazed at me with such concentration that their faces contorted with the effort, as if I were speaking some exotic language. But my exposé sounded so convincing, and the cause so worthy, that they couldn’t bring themselves to send me away empty-handed; they merely remarked that they weren’t sure they had quite understood and asked what exactly they could do for me.
‘I don’t want to put you to any trouble,’ I said politely. ‘Perhaps if I could just see the lists of graduates? That shouldn’t be too much of a problem, should it?’
They gazed at me in blank astonishment.
‘I just want the basics,’ I said, conciliatorily. ‘The year of graduation, the title of the MA thesis, that sort of thing.’
‘For which years?’ one of them, presumably the senior, finally asked.
I performed a rough mental calculation, and decided that Madame couldn’t have finished university before 1955. ‘Well, let’s say from the mid-1950s.’
‘From the mid-1950s!’ the Senior One gasped. ‘Do you know how much of it there is?’
‘It can’t be helped, I’m afraid, that’s the task I’ve been set,’ I replied, and spread my arms in a gesture intended to express helpless devotion to duty.
She rose, went up to an enormous cupboard, placed a ladder against it and ascended. Reaching up to the top shelf, piled with stacks of bulging folders, she extracted an unimposing-looking file, shook the dust off it and came back down.
‘There you are,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘From 1955 to 1960.’
Struggling to contain my excitement, I sat down at one of the desks and began to peruse the documents entrusted to me.
The pages were divided into five columns, headed ‘Name’, ‘Date of birth’, ‘Title of thesis’, ‘Supervisor’ and ‘Final mark’. I took a notebook out of my briefcase and slowly, page by page, began to go through the list of graduates. From time to time, when I felt the eyes of the secretaries upon me, I made a show of copying something down in my notebook.
Madame’s name was not on the lists for 1955, 1956 or 1957. This wasn’t seriously disturbing; indeed, in a sense it was a relief, for it also delayed her date of birth: she was younger than I’d thought, and that could only be in my favour. In this situation, every year that reduced the age difference between us was worth its weight in gold.
The tension did not begin to mount until I had gone through the list for 1958 and still hadn’t found her name. The chances of finding her now were swiftly diminishing: there were only two years left. If she wasn’t in those, I would have to ask for lists from the following years, and the secretaries might find this suspicious; besides, I didn’t want to abuse their patience, already sorely tried.
I turned over the page with ‘1959’ inscribed on it in an elaborate calligraphic style. And there it was, finally, on the very first page. A shiver of relief and anticipation ran through me. I took in at a glance the data entered in the five columns, and became the possessor of the following knowledge:
– that in addition to the name by which she was known, a graceful but popular one, she also had another, much rarer: Victoria
– that she was born on the twenty-seventh of January, 1935
– that her thesis was entitled La femme émancipée dans l’oeuvre de Simone de Beauvoir
– that her supervisor had been Dr Magdalena Surowa-Léger
– that her final mark had been the highest and rarest: an A
A little dazed and slightly overwhelmed, I stared at this information and wondered what to do next. I had what I wanted; I had made progress. But this only whetted my appetite. I was still in the woods: my new knowledge gave rise to a whole new series of unanswered questions, and made me realise how much more there still was to find out. In fact, of the things I had discovered one alone was entirely satisfactory: her date of birth. I now knew that she was thirty-one years old, and that in three months she would be thirty-two. Everything else cried out for further inquiry and explanation. Why ‘Victoria’, for instance? And what had she written in her thesis? And why that topic in the first place – had she chosen it herself, or had it been assigned? I’d heard that students usually chose their thesis topics themselves. But if she had chosen it herself, why had she done so? Because of her literary tastes? Her views? Her personal experience?
Simone de Beauvoir had been translated into Polish, and I had read several of her books: the first two volumes of her autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, and La Force de l’âge. I hadn’t been very taken with them: I’d found them long-winded and overwritten, in some places grotesque in their extreme rationalism, in others effusively over-emotional. Nevertheless, I couldn’t deny that they gave me some insight into a woman’s psychology, and in particular into the morals and intellectual life of the Paris existentialist set.
The general impression I got was of a sort of learned twittering. Beauvoir tells us how she rejected compromise and ‘bourgeois’ values in favour of intensity of experience, and resolved to lead what was known in existentialist terminology as an ‘authentic’ life. But the ‘authentic’ life, contrary to what one might suppose, was not one of decadence and extravagance. It consisted, first, in a fanatical and ridiculous politicising of every conceivable sphere of existence: one had always to be in opposition to something, to protest and to rebel against something or other. This protest was usually indulged in at little cost to oneself – indeed it tended, if anything, to be quite profitable – and always made a horrendous din. Secondly, it involved interminable and relentless self-analysis: every single experience, reaction and desire had to be subjected to rigorous intellectual scrutiny and then interpreted psychologically and philosophically. That, at least, is what it looked like. Reading these fat, bloated tomes full of verbiage, one got the impression that from her earliest childhood Simone de Beauvoir had lived in a state of permanent self-vivisection. She treated herself as an object of scientific inquiry, and her internal eye was alert to the slightest reaction. Every detail of every emotion was immediately noted down; nothing was overlooked, nothing left unanalysed.
What was there in all this that could have interested Madame? Did she like it or was she repelled by it? Did Beauvoir’s personality, views and way of looking at the world seem foreign to her, or did they strike a familiar chord? Was her choice of thesis topic prompted by approval and admiration, perhaps even by a feeling of kinship? Or was it, on the contrary, the result of profound disagreement, irritation and disgust? She was, after all, the head of a socialist school, and as such was unlikely to feel much sympathy, let alone approval, for anything written by the (admittedly unofficial) consort of the author of L’être et le néant. For however enlightened this reigning deity of artistic and intellectual life in Paris in the 1940s and 1950s might be, however left-wing and fervent in her dreams of world revolution, however slavish in her devotion to the French communists and outspoken in her support of movements of national liberation throughout the world, the fact remained that she was connected with existentialism. And existentialism, from the Marxist point of view, was a ‘nihilist’, ‘fundamentally bourgeois’ and even ‘fascist’ doctrine. (After all, Martin Heidegger – ‘Hitler’s right-hand man in Nazi higher education’ – had been one of its co-found
ers!) Marxism, of course, as ‘the only truly scientific system’, had long ago exposed, with childish ease, the intellectual poverty and moral rottenness of this ‘pseudo-philosophy’. Nevertheless it continued to proliferate, as weeds do, and to poison people’s minds. It was still necessary, therefore, to oppose it.
After 1956, opposition to existentialism assumed a new form. During the early years of the Cold War it had been simply taboo; with the ‘thaw’, however, it was allowed some expression, although mainly in order that it might be ridiculed and condemned. That, at least, was the official ritual, and numerous journals, magazines and academic conferences acted accordingly. This being the case, what could one expect from an MA thesis, especially an MA thesis supervised by someone with such a sinister name?
Surowa-Léger: the name was not just sinister but dubious. The woman had connections with bourgeois France! She had probably married a Frenchman. So she must be interested in trips abroad. And that meant she must be ideologically untainted – or at least very careful. She must have seen to it that Simone de Beauvoir’s famous ‘emancipated woman’ turned out to be ‘incorrectly’ or at best ‘superficially’ emancipated.
‘Do you know how I could get in touch with Dr Surowa-Léger?’ I asked.
‘Dr Léger,’ replied the Senior One, neatly omitting the first barrel of the name, ‘left the department a long time ago.’
‘She’s at the Academy, I suppose?’ I asked in tones of respectful gravity.
‘She left the country,’ the other secretary hastened to explain. ‘Five years ago. She went to France. For good.’
‘Oh, I see . . .’
My head began to spin with new questions. Gone! Left for good! Stayed in the West! It was like some kind of malevolent curse. People who went to the West and stayed there were considered ‘traitors’ or ‘renegades’; at best they were seen as people with no ‘moral fibre’, so tempted by Western trinkets – clothes and cosmetics, cars and nightclubs – that they succumbed to the shameful lure of consumerism. Of course, Dr Léger had probably left in order to join her French husband – but perhaps she had planned the whole thing in advance, in cold blood? Perhaps Magdalena Surowa had married M. Léger not for love or even because of a common interest in things French, but only because she hoped that sooner or later, through him, she would get to the West? In any event, that wasn’t the important thing. The question was who she was while she was still in Poland. An ideologically pure Marxist, critical of existentialism and other Western novelties? Or someone who approved of it, even admired it, along with other forms of Western decadence?
On the answer to these questions depended the interpretation of Madame’s final mark. What was the significance of that A? Had it rewarded a devastating critique or a sympathetic analysis? Or perhaps the thesis was no more than a pretence at criticism, a mask, assumed in order to wallow safely in forbidden ideas? How on earth was I to find out?
‘Where could I find out more about these people?’ I asked, gesturing towards the open file.
‘Which people, exactly?’ inquired the Senior One, an edge of impatience in her voice.
I almost said, ‘Well, for example, about Miss . . .’ but at the last minute I thought better of it. I began leafing nonchalantly through the file, as if the choice were a matter of complete indifference to me, until I came to 1959 again.
‘Oh, well, let’s say these, for instance,’ I said offhandedly, ‘the ones from ’59.’
‘Fifty-nine,’ the Other One repeated, ‘let me see, whom have we there?’ She got up and came over to look at the list. Once again I was on the verge of supplying Madame’s name as an example, and once again I held my tongue. The Other One went down the list of names with her finger. About halfway down she stopped.
‘There you are!’ she cried in a joyful voice, ‘Dr Monten. He’d be perfect for you. He’s a lecturer in our department, in seventeenth-century literature.’
Monten, Monten . . . wasn’t that the name of my mountain cicerone, the man who had taken me to the Tatras, the friend of my parents’ from before the war? Could it be the same man? Could this 1959 graduate of Warsaw University and possessor of that seldom-found combination of first names, Frederick Bonaventure, have any connection with my friend? Was he perhaps a relative, even his son?
I knew there was a son, but I had no idea what his name was, how old he was or what he did. Somehow we’d never talked about it, and I had never met him. Now, excited by this extraordinary coincidence, which might turn out to be priceless for me, I feverishly began to calculate whether it was possible.
Indeed it was. My guide had been around sixty when he took me to the mountains; he could easily have a son of thirty-two. All I needed now was some confirmation.
‘Would that be the son of Professor Constant Monten?’ I inquired, knowing full well that my Tatras guide possessed no such title.
‘Professor Monten?’ asked the Senior One. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’
‘But surely,’ I insisted, ‘surely you know who I mean? That famous geologist – you know. And he’s a well-known mountaineer, too.’
‘I’ve no idea, I assure you,’ she said, shrugging, and cast an inquiring glance at the Other One. The Other One just goggled.
‘Well, never mind,’ I said lightly, then added, poker-faced, ‘On the other hand, it would be quite simple to check.’
‘You could just ask,’ said the Other One, her tone clearly implying that if it was so important to me I could take the trouble of going to the source and inquiring about it myself.
‘Oh, there’s no need to bother him with questions,’ I said. ‘Couldn’t we just check the name?’
‘What name?!’ snapped the Senior One, barely controlling her impatience.
‘His father’s,’ I explained equably. ‘If it’s Constant, he must be the one. It’s not a very common name.’
‘And where do you expect us to check it?’ inquired the Other One, equally impatient.
‘Surely you must have a record of it somewhere? In this country you have to give your father’s name on every form you fill in.’
‘We’d have to call administration . . .’ mused the Other One, half to herself and half to her superior.
‘Yes, why not do that?’ I agreed enthusiastically.
‘Yes, all right, but what’s it got to do with anything, anyway?’ said the Senior One, giving way to her irritation. ‘What’s the purpose of all this? What does it matter whether Dr Monten is or isn’t the son of this professor of yours?’
‘Oh, but it does, it does,’ I sighed enigmatically, ‘it matters a great deal. You have no idea how much depends on it!’
The Senior One cast a martyred glance at the heavens, reached for the telephone and began to dial. ‘It’s me again, from the dean’s office,’ she announced. ‘Could you please check Dr Monten’s first name for me?’
‘His father’s name!’ I hissed desperately at her.
‘I mean, Dr Monten’s father’s name,’ she corrected, drumming her fingers on the desk. There was a pause, during which I shut my eyes and crossed my fingers. ‘Thank you, thank you so much,’ I finally heard her say, and the receiver came down with a crash. ‘Yes, his name is Constant. And that’s the last thing I’m doing for you today. We have work to do, you know.’
‘I’m so terribly grateful, I don’t know how to thank you,’ I said, jumping up and kissing her hand. ‘And you, too, of course,’ I added, bounding toward the Other One. ‘And now I’ll take myself off. I won’t bother you any more. I’m gone!’ I said, rushing for the door. ‘Au revoir, mesdames!’
Outside in the corridor, just as I was letting go of the door-handle, I heard the muffled voice of the Senior One exclaim, ‘Good heavens, what an odd creature! Where in the world did he come from?’
Freddy the Professor
In the bus, I took up my usual position near the rear door, facing the back window, so that I had a view of the street and not of the crowd of passengers inside, and began to a
rrange my spoils into some sort of order in my mind.
The information that a student from Madame’s year, someone who had studied with her, was almost certainly the son of my Mountaineer made everything else I had learned pale in comparison. Her date of birth, the title of her thesis were dry, official facts, a poor second-best beside the juicy first-hand knowledge undoubtedly in the possession of Frederick Bonaventure, to whom Fate, in her magnanimity, was now directing me.
The directions supplied by Fate, however, were no more than an opportunity, and it was up to me to make good use of it. Constant Monten’s son might be a rich source of information, but I couldn’t assume he would reveal everything he knew about Madame as soon as he saw me or heard my name. I had to lead up to it. The question was how. I couldn’t just ask him straight out. It seemed I was going to have to play more games, give another one of my performances; but I had no idea at the time of the sort of comedy this would turn out to be. All I knew was that I had to start with the Mountaineer.
That evening, after supper, when my parents were listening to Radio Free Europe in the dining-room, I took the telephone from there into my room (so as not to disturb them), plugged it in and, having closed all the doors behind me, dialled Constant’s familiar number.
‘I have an unusual favour to ask,’ I began after we had exchanged greetings.
‘Go ahead – what can I do for you?’
Even at that moment I wasn’t sure how I would open my game. It seemed sensible to begin by making sure that the precious Dr Monten from the Department of Romance Languages was indeed his son. In the end I chose a somewhat bolder opening move.
‘Does Professor . . . um, that is, Frederick, does he still work at the university?’ I asked, promoting the son as I had recently promoted the father.
‘Professor? Frederick?’ he repeated.
Madame Page 9