This was the Renaissance way; the way of Elizabethan courtship, the way of the bold Shakespearean lover.
The third and last way lay somewhere between the two: not to submit and yet not to attack. To wait, but not idly. To try to transfer the game to a different court, outside school, to throw the ball onto neutral ground. Somewhere where school rules no longer applied, where, instead of mistress and servant, headmistress and pupil, there would be just two people.
This was the most ambitious way, a way worthy of the enlightened rationalism of Voltaire and Rousseau. It was also the most tempting of the three.
Mute submission, although the simplest, I couldn’t accept. It would leave too bitter a taste, too many regrets. The ‘Renaissance’ lover’s onslaught, on the other hand, with all its outspoken boldness and dashing repartee, I felt was beyond me. That kind of thing required a lightness of heart I didn’t have; one couldn’t pull it off when consumed by passion. Which, unfortunately, I was. For passion renders one helpless, or at least it weakens one’s control – over one’s face, one’s voice, one’s gestures and especially one’s language. Passion is always gloomy and devoid of lightness . . . I’d read that somewhere (could it have been in The Magic Mountain?); now I was discovering for myself how true it was.
I chose the third way.
Unarmed and unequipped, I set off for new territories.
Centre de Civilisation
The inspiringly named Centre de Civilisation Française no longer inhabited its old quarters in the massive, stately old Staszic House on the Royal Way, in that delta of the New World Boulevard which forms the gates of the Krakowskie Przedmiescie, the street that leads to the Old City. It had moved out almost a quarter of a century ago to take up residence in a dilapidated university building on Obozna Street. The same building was also home to the Department of Romance Languages and, ironically enough, to the equally dilapidated Biology Department, poverty-stricken and stinking permanently of mice and experiment rats. The interior aspect of its quarters was no doubt also far removed from the grandeur and spaciousness of the room known, before the war, as the Gold Room. Three cramped little cells where desks, shelves and filing cabinets with a card catalogue jostled for space acted simultaneously as archives, records room, lending library and, according to a notice tacked onto one of the doors, salle de lecture. This was the face that French Civilisation, in other words French Culture – that embodiment of Rationalism, Progress, Modernity and Freedom – presented to the world.
And yet, despite it all – despite the pokiness and shabbiness and poverty, the flimsy doors, the disgusting floors, the seedy office furniture, the windows unwashed since the Flood and the general air of decline – one felt this place was different from other places, even from others in the same building, places like, for instance, the office or reading room of the department I had recently visited.
The first thing that struck one as different was the smell. It was a pleasant, delicate and somehow invigorating mixture of subtle (not sweet) lily of the valley and good tobacco (Gitanes and Gauloises, as it turned out). Then there were all those ingenious, well-designed, attractive little items of office paraphernalia that you never saw anywhere else: different-coloured drawing-pins and rubber bands; shiny paper-clips in an oval dish with a magnetic ‘crater’ at the bottom; rolls of Sellotape (both clear and opaque) in those clever round little plastic gadgets with a serrated edge to tear it off neatly; and, finally, a huge collection of non-refillable Bic pens. They were mainly of the straight, polygonal kind, made of some sort of translucent material, with different-coloured caps (blue, red or black) and metal tips, slender and tapering like the nose cone of a missile, with ink to match; but also some of the rounded kind with long, straight, transparent tips and a small vertical slit at the side where you clicked a triangular sort of tooth in and out.
To this rich panoply was added the equally unusual appearance of the books on the shelves and the newspapers and magazines neatly arranged on a long, sloping stand. For the books were not covered in the grey cardboard or coarse brown wrapping paper familiar from other libraries; here, bright bindings and colourful jackets (and quite a few of them had jackets) gleamed through smooth layers of laminated plastic or stiff Cellophane, materials not employed in the manufacture of book bindings in any of the Warsaw Pact countries, not even in the eastern part of the homeland of Gutenberg, technically the most advanced. The magazines, even the daily newspapers such as Le Figaro and Le Monde, looked quite different from ours; even the print was different. Polish newspapers were printed on coarse, fibrous paper that tore at the slightest provocation; the print was ugly, uneven, badly-aligned and easily smudged. Here the paper was thin and smooth and yet quite resistant to tearing; the magazines were glossy; the print was clear and graceful and pleasing to the eye.
Finally, behind a massive desk covered with green baize, which also served as the reception desk, sat a woman of distinguished and elegant aspect, as unlike the personnel one met in Polish secretariats, reading rooms and administration offices as it was possible to imagine. Around sixty, slim and sharp-featured, with short, well-cut hair touched with silver-grey, she wore an attractive pair of rimless spectacles with a delicate gold bridge and equally thin gold legs, a beautifully cut suit of grey wool, and at her neck a wine-coloured scarf. She sat perfectly straight and typed with energy and competence. There were silver rings on her long, bony fingers and a silver bracelet on her right wrist. On the baize, near the hand with the braceleted wrist, lay a packet of Gitanes, a red cylindrical lighter of transparent plastic, and a white ashtray that said ‘Courvoisier’. In the ashtray was the crushed stub of a Gitane with a trace of red lipstick.
On the way in I had assumed, in my ignorance and possibly also under the influence of the vision or, less grandiosely, l’imaginaire evoked by the name of this shopwindow of French esprit, that the place would be buzzing with activity, perhaps even crowded, so that my quiet entry would go unremarked. The unexpected calm that reigned inside was disconcerting. My self-assurance deserted me, and I fell into a state of confused indecision. Instead of crossing immediately to the empty reading room and there thinking through the details of my plan in peace and quiet, I lingered foolishly at the newspaper stand and began to leaf uncertainly through Le Figaro. The results of this slip, or rather this schoolboy error, were no more than thirty seconds in coming.
‘May I help you?’ asked the silver lady, interrupting her typing. Her voice was deep and low, and strikingly like the voice of one of the women newsreaders on Radio Free Europe.
Once again I had to improvise. My only compass was the rule book of chess, and the rules of chess said: don’t attack too early, especially not with your queen – reserve her for later; choose, if you can, one of the less popular openings; develop your strategy steadily and wait for your opponent to make a mistake; don’t launch your offensive until your position is well secured. In the present case this boiled down to gaining the favour of the silver-haired Marianne, or even winning her heart.
‘Well, I’m looking for something a bit out of the ordinary,’ I said, approaching the desk, ‘and that’s why I was hesitating whether to ask you at all. I saw you were busy, so I didn’t want to interrupt you.’
‘What is it? Ask away.’ She measured me with a careful glance. ‘There’s nothing that can’t be managed. It’s only a question of determination. At worst, of time.’
‘That’s a rare attitude; it’s very nice of you. But I wonder if it really can be managed in this case. You see, what I’m looking for has a connection with French culture that’s . . . well, rather special, unusual, not immediately obvious.’
‘As long as there’s some connection,’ she replied, smiling.
‘It’s a translation. Specifically, a French translation of the Rhine hymn by Hölderlin. You know – that amazing German poet who crossed the Alps to Bordeaux, alone, and then, on his way back, still alone, and on foot, experienced a vision and went mad. Apparently, while he was up o
n some peak, he saw Dionysus and talked to him. And in Paris . . . but anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, I’m writing an essay on romantic journeys – the Marquis de Custine’s, Joanna Schopenhauer’s – and I need a quotation from Hölderlin’s Rhine hymn. And the reason I need it in French, and not in Polish or German, is that I’m writing it for a competition in the journal . . . Perspective de Genève, and they want all the quotations in French. I’ve got the same problem with Joanna Schopenhauer, but at least that’s prose, so at a pinch I can do the translation myself. But poetry – and a poem like this!’ I shrugged and raised my eyes heavenwards. ‘Anyway, I’ve been everywhere. All the libraries: the main library, the departmental libraries, even the national library. None of them has it. No one could help me. Finally someone told me I should come here; they said it’s the kind of thing you’d be able to help with. The Centre, they said, wouldn’t let me down. So here I am. You’re my last hope. And I ought to mention that the first prize in the competition is a month’s stay in Switzerland – not something to be sneezed at. With trips to the Alps, and not just anywhere in the Alps: to the sources of the Rhine, in the St Gotthard Pass and the Adula range, where trembling forests –’
I galloped on with a shameless imitation of Constant, my eyes half-closed, my head thrown slightly back, reciting in German, with a dreadful accent and some inaccuracy,
. . . and crags high above
Look down, every day,
There, in that icy abyss . . .
and stopped, unable to remember the rest. To cover up the lacuna I quickly added, as if it were the final chord of the melody, the beginning of the third stanza, the one I knew best:
. . . the voice of the noblest of rivers,
The freeborn Rhine . . .
The silver-haired Marianne was regarding me with a smile worthy of the author of the Treatise on Toleration.
‘To the Adula range, you say,’ she remarked finally, as if the name stirred some memory, and added elegiacally, in German, ‘There, into that icy abyss,’ with a perfect accent and an appropriate change of case.
I froze. She knows German . . . she knows everything! She’s seen through me! I’m done for! But my fears proved groundless. Her tone and expression had been no more than a game, a playful form of irony.
‘Make sure you don’t fall in.’ She raised her eyebrows in mock caution.
‘I can assure you I intend to follow your advice,’ I replied, returning her smile and lowering my eyes. ‘However, first I have to win the competition.’
‘Well, if that’s the goal’ – she rose energetically and strode to the card catalogue – ‘to work! Hölderlin’s Rhine, you say . . . German Romanticism, then.’
She stood at the catalogue with her back to me: elegant, dignified, statuesque. There was something regal in her demeanour. Even in such ordinary and trifling movements as those involved in the pulling out of drawers and shuffling through index cards she displayed harmony and grace, moving as though picking delicately through jewels or playing the harp. And suddenly it struck me that her way of carrying herself, her whole way of being, was in many ways similar to Madame’s. Of course! The pas, the gestures, the ‘choreography’ of the whole – it was all there. The elegance, the precision, the always slightly excessive haughtiness; the same sharp, nimble tongue; the same irony and playful contrariness. Only with her it was friendly and appealing, not icy; it didn’t, as with Madame, freeze the blood in your veins.
What would it hurt her, I thought wistfully of my queen, to play an ‘open’, not a ‘closed’ variation of this ‘French partie’; to play it in a major, not a minor key. She would gain so much! We would both gain so much by it!
The silver-haired Marianne, meanwhile, had hauled down from the stacks a tome of imposing dimensions and was now engaged, balancing it against the edge of a conveniently situated shelf, in turning its pages.
I wondered where Constant had taught this poem to Claire, and how he went about it. Had he recited it to her, as he had to me? Or had he given it to her to read? Whatever he did, if it was in the Centre (wherever it was quartered at that time) it was being repeated now – like a musical theme. Once again someone was singing this song to someone who works here. As if it were an echo coming back, years later. The ‘holy fire’ still burns, then! The old times are returning!
‘C’est ensuite seulement que les impies . . .’ Marianne’s deep alto resounded suddenly in the silence. She was reading from the book open in front of her, pointing with the tips of two fingers to a place roughly in the middle of the page. The fingers proceeded downwards as she read out the rest of the text:
. . . flouting their own laws, in sure
Defiance of heavenly fire,
Chose to scorn the ways of mortals; then it was
That in their arrogant contempt they strove
To be the equals of the gods.
She raised her eyes from the page and turned to me.
I understood the words, but I wasn’t sure where they came from. The poem whose translation into the language of Clovis and his descendants I allegedly wanted was not a poem I knew well, to say the least. In fact, I knew (from the German edition) only that it had been written in 1801 and dedicated to someone called Sinclaire; that it consisted of unrhymed stanzas; that there were fifteen of these, and that they were long, most of them fifteen lines. This was all I knew about its form. My knowledge of its content boiled down to the one fragment pencilled faintly on the title page of Joanna Schopenhauer’s memoirs and a few of the lines above and below it, which Constant had translated for me during our conversation and which I had later copied out into my Cahier. About the rest of it, how it went on and what other themes it contained, I had not the slightest idea. So the ‘impious’ who flouted their own laws and defied the heavenly fire, although they sounded just as grand as ‘the noblest of rivers’, didn’t quite seem to fit. It was prudent, therefore, to proceed with caution.
‘C’est une allusion à moi?’ I asked lightly, hoping above all to conceal my uncertainty and make it clear that I had understood the lines, but also to give the impression that an appropriate response, in a foreign language, presented no difficulty for me.
‘Pardon, mais pourquoi?’ She frowned and tilted her head to one side.
‘Voilà que moi . . . ,’ I hunted about feverishly for a suitably pithy phrase, and finally found refuge in: ‘. . . je voudrais chasser un tigre avec un filet à papillons.’
‘You want to do what?’
‘An old Polish expression: hunting a tiger with a butterfly net. Un filet à papillons.’
‘En français,’ she informed me in an amused tone (again, rather as Madame might have done, but in a friendly way), ‘on dit plûtot “vouloir prendre la lune avec les dents”: one wants to seize the moon with one’s teeth.’
‘Of course,’ I agreed quickly, as if I’d known it all along and merely forgotten. Amused by the French expression as well as by the fact that the word lune was a feminine noun, I added with a smile, ‘In fact, that’s much more apposite in this case.’
‘Apposite? Why?’
‘If my moon is language – the art of speech,’ I explained, deftly camouflaging the real cause of my merriment, ‘then teeth are a more appropriate instrument than a butterfly net.’
‘Tiens. Perhaps.’ She shrugged. ‘In any case, that wasn’t my point. Your poet, according to what it says here,’ she continued, glancing back at the book, ‘was referring to people who foment revolution in the name of some noble idea but instead of creating a better world create hell on earth. Historically it’s a reference to the leaders of the French Revolution, but morally it can be taken as applying to despots of any kind, especially usurpers in the clutches of hubris – overweening pride.’ She looked up again.
‘Well, if it wasn’t an allusion to me, then why did you read that particular fragment? It’s a very long poem – there are fifteen stanzas.’
‘It’s the one that caught my eye,’ she explained. ‘
There are only excerpts here, not the whole poem. It’s not an anthology of poetry’ – she raised the book slightly – ‘but a collection of essays on the poetry of the Romantic period by French scholars of German literature. And that’s what’s quoted here from the poem you’re looking for – at least, it’s the first excerpt I happened across; perhaps there are others.’ She took the book back to the desk, laid it down on the dark-green cloth and began to leaf through it methodically.
Home at last! I thought. ‘What I really need are the first three or four stanzas. Mainly the one that talks about how “the ray of light that greets the newborn” is stronger than adversity or education.’
‘Car tel tu es né, tel tu resteras,’ she read out with a questioning smile. ‘Is that the one you mean? Rien n’est plus puissant que la naissance, et le premier rayon du jour qui touche le nouveau-né?’
Madame Page 26