Madame

by Antoni Libera

  avec les meilleurs souhaits

  de courage et de . . .

  Victoire*

  I stared transfixed at this signal, this complex construction of words and objects, mentally unwrapping it further, peeling off successive layers of meaning to find deeper and deeper ones as its significance seeped in. There were so many implications to consider! There was the ‘first cause’ itself – the fact that she had sent this at all, that she had remembered my twentieth birthday and decided to give me a present. There was the embodiment of that idea, the object – a Mont Blanc pen from the ‘Hommage à Mozart’ series. Finally, there was the message – the inscription on the gold-edged card.

  She knew when my birthday was – and had remembered it. She knew my address. How? She may have found it in the school records, but in that case she must have written it down and taken it with her – and why would she have done that? On the other hand, where and how else could she have got it? Then there was the message: she remembered that ‘last question’ in her inscription and she remembered my essay – remembered it well. The underlining of those three letters was a subtle allusion to a tiny detail: my grotesque, pseudo-scholarly argument that the word ‘virginité’ supposedly comes from the Latin ‘vir’. ‘Vir’, she was saying by that underlining, ‘is the root of viril, the adjective which properly qualifies your current condition – not of virginité, as you insisted then.’ And her choice of gift was a double allusion: to the way I had interpreted Virgo’s occupation and to my avowed desire to be a writer.

  In the extraordinary memory, the precision, the attention to detail, I saw a trace, a distant echo, of her father, the Max Constant had described to me. I remembered the story of their meeting on the sixth of August, at noon, in front of the railway station in a little Swiss mountain town, as arranged, on Max’s initiative, eight months earlier, on the spur of the moment in a Warsaw street.

  But there was more. Embedded in the mosaic she had sent were pieces of rock from geological strata of her life about which ‘officially’ I knew nothing. The postcard with the view of Mont Blanc, the phrase ‘la force de l’âge’, and that final ‘Victoire’, with its capital letter and dual function – as the complement of ‘souhaits’, but also as a proper name – her signature. Of course, it could all be explained differently: the postcard of Mont Blanc could have been picked simply because it made a nice allusion to the pen; it wasn’t necessarily a reference to her father’s hopes and dreams about her birthplace. The phrase ‘la force de l’âge’ was a common one; it needn’t be an allusion to Simone de Beauvoir. That final ‘Victoire’ could, after all, be an allusion to the last words of my essay or to Conrad’s Victory, which my Cahier des citations had copiously quoted.

  But I didn’t believe it. I believed these were signals connected with the deep currents of her life. But if so, if they were indeed references to her ‘personal data’, then several questions arose. Should I conclude that she was aware of how much I knew about her? Yet how on earth could she have found out? Who could have told her? And why was she letting me know it now? What was she playing at, and why? What did she intend? What did she want to achieve?

  And the last, crucial question: did this whole surprise have any connection with my oeuvre – my recent literary début? Could she have read my story? How? Where? And what, in that case, did it mean? ‘You write nicely, my knight. So now . . . now write something for me. As a token of your love, a tribute to your Mozart’?

  I went to see Constant and asked him straight out whether he’d talked to anyone about my novella. He said yes, he’d mentioned it to a few friends. Had he sent it to someone abroad, by any chance? He stared at me in surprise. I took the postcard of Mont Blanc and my new fountain pen out of my pocket, handed them to him, and said ‘These just came for me from France. Through the post. Have you any idea who they could be from?’

  He examined the pen, nodding appreciatively, then glanced at the postcard and gave a faint smile. But when he turned it over and saw what was written on the back his whole body tensed. He gazed at it in silence.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ I asked finally.

  ‘I don’t know what to think of it,’ he replied, his voice strangely changed.

  ‘Of what, exactly?’ I persisted, feigning bafflement.

  He went over to the little shelf with the lamp and again took out the old, paper-covered book; again he opened it to the title page. Then he placed the postcard with the view of Mont Blanc alongside the faded lines inscribed there, and for a long time studied the two texts thus juxtaposed.

  ‘You know where this quotation comes from,’ he said, pointing to the two lines of French. It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I replied, smiling inwardly at the sight of my mentor falling victim to his own boomerang, which he had thrown at me almost two years earlier. ‘From Hölderlin’s Rhine hymn.’

  ‘Yes,’ he muttered absently, ‘but from which bit exactly?’

  As the question fell, my self-confidence suddenly left me; in that one moment, the feeling of being in control, of performing, like a magician amusing himself with his tricks, ebbed away and dissolved. For it was a question I had never thought to ask myself. Absorbed in reading between the lines and deciphering the message’s subtle allusions, I hadn’t paid much attention to the quotation; my eyes had slid over it, noting it but for some reason treating it as something obvious, not needing interpretation or analysis. After all, it was in my Cahier des citations, which she had read – or at least kept, for some days, in her possession. My mind must have decided that this was explanation enough, and passed on. Now, belatedly, I saw that it was far from adequate. The quotation in my Cahier des citations had been in German, and it had not been among the lines I had singled out as the most ‘significant’ by underlining them and writing out Constant’s translation alongside: the lines her mother had inscribed in Constant’s copy of the memoirs. Why, then, had she picked this particular quotation and not any of the others? Because it went well with the photograph? But there was no spring, no source, on Mont Blanc! Those lines were about the mystery of the Rhine, which flows from elsewhere. And finally, how had she come by the French version? Had she gone to the trouble of digging up a translation (as I had done at the Centre)? Or had she translated them herself? In both cases she would have to know German. But did she? Where was the truth in all this?

  Trying to disguise my confusion, I asked casually, ‘What does it matter which bit?’

  ‘What does it matter?’ He gave an odd smile. ‘Listen: “The pure of source is always a mystery. Even song can scarcely unveil it.” This,’ he said, tapping the postcard with his finger, ‘comes directly before the passage inscribed here.’ He tapped the book. ‘These are the next lines . . . how does she know that?’ he added, almost in a whisper.

  ‘How does who know?’ I asked, still feigning innocence.

  ‘Oh, come on, stop playing around,’ he muttered impatiently. ‘Honestly, I don’t know why you persist in this charade.’

  ‘Because I don’t understand it myself,’ I admitted, discarding my mask. ‘I thought you might have something to do with it. Now I see I was wrong. I take it you don’t know her address in France?’

  ‘Wasn’t it on the envelope?’

  ‘If it had been, I wouldn’t be bothering you with all this.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he replied. ‘I believe I told you she’d broken off all contact with me.’

  ‘She could have renewed it.’

  ‘She could have. But she didn’t.’

  ‘And Mr – Freddy, I mean – does he know anything?’

  ‘About what?’ His mind was clearly elsewhere.

  ‘What’s become of her. Where she lives, and so on.’

  ‘I doubt it. But I don’t really know.’ He shrugged and put the worn, paper-covered Jugendleben back in its place on the shelf. ‘Why don’t you ask him? Ask around; ask the people at the Centre.’

  I asked him. I asked around.
I asked everyone I could think of.

  They all shook their heads. No one knew.

  *ENDGAME, followed by Act without Words

  *No . . . not this time . . . not yet. And, of course, not here. One day . . . elsewhere . . . perhaps. When your book is finished.

  *From Aquarius in his prime to Virgo in the age of virility (since the tenth of September), instead of a goose-quill pen, with best wishes for courage and for . . . victory.

  SEVEN

  Classroom Experience

  Should I go on? Well, the story doesn’t end here. So I’ll go on.

  My university days were exciting and turbulent, but they were also depressing. Turbulent because many things happened in my life during that time, and depressing because the authorities, after some years of relative moderation in their harassment of citizens and devastation of the country, again bared their claws and showed their uglier side.

  I read, I studied, I perfected my craft. I discovered various pleasures of life, availing myself of the freedoms that come with maturity. I conspired with an innocent and hopeful heart against the regime and gradually became a fully fledged participant in the dissident movement. Around me, in the meantime, things were worsening: the government indulged in ever harsher and more despicable acts of repression; it grew violent and unrestrained. In 1968 there was the campaign against Jews and the intelligentsia; then Czechoslovakia, and Poland’s part in the provision of ‘fraternal aid’; finally plain slaughter, in good old Moscow style, in Gdansk and especially in Gdynia.

  Well, I had what I wanted: vivid experiences! Strong emotions! Thrills and chills! History with a capital ‘H’: here it was, in the making. I certainly couldn’t complain that life was bland or boring. My dream of ‘living in interesting times’ had been fulfilled, with a vengeance.

  The manner of its fulfilment was bitter enough, but the irony was that my experience of its ‘inspiring’ and ‘uplifting’ power was not confined to what reached me, in the safety of my armchair, through the press, the radio or the television news: as a student, and especially as a fledgling author, I felt its effects more directly.

  After the purge at Warsaw University, the standard of lectures and seminars fell dramatically; at the same time the number of restrictions rose and discipline became draconian. The infamous Dr Dolowy became chairman of the department; Professor Levittoux emigrated; Freddy, who in any case had for years been relegated to the margins of departmental life, now found himself completely shunted aside. Mediocrities triumphed; opportunists and sycophants, envious and frustrated second-raters had their day. It became clear to me that there was nothing to be hoped for there; I would have to look to myself and forge my destiny alone. Which in fact accorded perfectly with my aspirations.

  So I wrote. I lived in a world of imagination and form. I felt independent and free. But this solution had its limits. After all, I wanted to be a writer: sooner or later, if I considered my writing not – at least not mainly – as a means of self-defence but as an attempt to create art, I would have to go out and present it to the world. And that was where the awful madness began: the attacks on one’s dignity, the injuries to one’s pride, the agonies of humiliation. For although my work had little to do with current events and nothing at all with the world of the ‘leading political system’, the censors always found grounds for suspicion. They made constant demands for changes, cuts, or at least so-called negotiations, which could end only in so-called compromise, even if it was just over a minor detail. I got the impression that their true purpose was not so much guarding and preserving purity of thought as systematically breaking the will of authors: making it abundantly clear to them that they were insignificant, superfluous creatures who, if they refused to agree to the conditions of the game, would cease to exist as authors altogether.

  The censors seemed to be negatively predisposed from the beginning, whatever was brought to them. Every writer lived in fear of them, even if he had only composed a little poem about flies and insects. ‘Why flies?’ they would say. ‘And insects to boot! Are you implying something about dirt and disease? Is that what you meant? No, no, we can’t have that. If you really want to write about the beauty of nature in our country, then go and write about butterflies and ants – industrious creatures, ants.’ But if you came in with a poem about butterflies and ants, they would say, ‘Why ants? Are you implying our country is an ant colony, some kind of giant machine in which our citizens are interchangeable robots? That the individual doesn’t count, is merely a cog in the wheel? No, no, that’s unacceptable. These aren’t Stalinist times! The day of errors and distortions are long past.’

  When I finished my second novella, An Encounter with Dionysus – about Hölderlin’s journey on foot across the Alps, his vision of Dionysus and his ensuing madness – and submitted it for publication, I was asked (the question would have been typical of the Tapeworm) why I had chosen as my hero a man heralded by Goebbels as the ‘standard-bearer of the Third Reich’. My explanatory efforts, backed up by voluminous documentation (naturally from books published in East Germany) attesting unequivocally that this was a sacrilegious act of slander on Goebbels’s part, were received reluctantly, with suspicion and mistrust. After raising endless objections and difficulties, the all-knowing censor, clearly a philosophy graduate, eventually passed the text but made it clear to the editor of the journal where it was to appear that he knew perfectly well ‘what was really going on here’: it was a blatant attempt, he said, to ‘propagate Western intellectual trends, existentialism among others’, since ‘that notorious fascist, Heidegger, one of its pillars’, had been interested in Hölderlin.

  But this was nothing compared to the battle I had to wage to publish my third story in this cycle about journeys (the idea that had germinated at school), a novella entitled Monsieur le Marquis, about the Marquis de Custine in Russia in 1839.

  I was fully aware of the risks involved. For although the target of Custine’s literary thrusts and the object of discontent of the ‘Russian masses’ and ‘Great October’ revolutionaries were one and the same, namely the rule of the tsars, that ‘despicable system of exploitation and humiliation’, the Marquis was looked upon with great disfavour in the ‘motherland of the proletariat’. What was sauce for the masses, especially for the Bolsheviks, was not necessarily sauce for anyone else, certainly not for a Frenchman of the minor nobility. It was not Custine’s blue blood, however, or the fact that he was French, or even his breathtaking insolence in daring to violate the carefully guarded Bolshevik monopoly on criticising the tsars, that inspired such loathing. What really rankled was that his vision of Tsar Nicholas’s Russia was unflattering to Russia in general (this by itself was blasphemy); worse, he had managed, quite unintentionally and from beyond the grave, to sow seeds of doubt about the claim that the Revolution had brought liberation and that communist Russia was the embodiment of the greatest freedom in the history of the world, and to expose this claim as the complete and monstrous lie that it was. When one read his ‘Letters’ – accounts of customs at the Romanov court, of human relations, of city and country life – one could not shake off the persistent impression that one was reading a report about the Soviet Union; one even found oneself harbouring the germ of an even more outrageous, truly criminal suspicion, namely that the days of the tsars were child’s play compared to life under the communists, that the latter by far surpassed in cruelty, oppression and destruction the worst excesses of the former.

  The Marquis de Custine’s wonderful account did not exist in Polish (it could have been published in Poland in the interwar period or by a Polish press abroad, but it hadn’t been). So my approach was rather different from the one I had taken in my previous two novellas. This time the facts themselves occupied the foreground, not my imagination or my interpretation of them. I saw it as my task to revive the memory of the marquis and his journey by sketching a few of the episodes described in his account and quoting from selected passages; I kept myself in the background. Her
e my aim was to render a service to history by smuggling into my novella a small glimpse of historical truth which otherwise would never be permitted to enter the consciousness of the people living in the People’s Republic of Poland.

  I had barely submitted the text before the difficulties began. ‘You haven’t got a hope in hell,’ pronounced all the editors, even the braver ones, whose support I could usually count on. ‘What on earth were you thinking, choosing a subject like this? Don’t you know where we are?’

  But I was obdurate. I insisted on taking the risk of sending it to the censors. And so, in the end, it was sent. The answer, when it came, was not the categorical ‘no’ I had feared, although substantial changes and cuts were demanded. Mostly these concerned the quotations from Custine that I had translated and incorporated, but a few remarks of mine, too, had been found objectionable.

  The negotiations began. And that was when I had my first taste of defeat. Psychologically, the battle I had embarked on was rather like gambling: addictive in a similar way. And the strange thing was that as one gave in and bowed to the censor’s demands, the desire to see one’s work published, instead of weakening, became progressively stronger. Tempting voices, internal and external, whispered, You’ve already given way on so much; why are you suddenly digging in your heels about this trivial little detail? It’s only an ornament, after all; what does it add? Nothing! Do you really want to risk forfeiting everything because of this? But if you agree to take it out or substitute another word, we’ll pass it, and you’ve got another publication to your credit.

  I cut, I made changes, I hedged; I tried to be as devious as I could. I succumbed to the illusion that I was cleverer than they were. The process went on for weeks. Finally the thing appeared in print. It was changed beyond recognition – a different text. I felt wretched, disgusted at myself for what I had done: it was vile, despicable. I was a nervous wreck. The praise of friends, the signs of appreciation from university colleagues, brought me no relief, let alone satisfaction. The opponent had won: I had allowed myself to be drawn into the game and to become dependent on him. I had given in; I had been broken. My self-respect was in shreds.