THE PATAGONIAN HARE
First published in France as Le Lièvre de Patagonie in 2009 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris.
First published in Great Britain in hardback and airport and export trade paperback in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Éditions Gallimard, 2009
Translation © Frank Wynne, 2012
Translated by Frank Wynne and revised by the author. The publisher wishes to thank Georgia de Chamberet for her help.
The moral right of Claude Lanzmann to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
The moral right of Frank Wynne to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
Copyright © 1945, 1952, 1961, Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell & The Drunken Boat, translated by Louise Varese, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, all rights reserved.
This publication was granted a translation subsidy from the Centre National du Livre, French Ministry of Culture.
This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme supported by Bloomberg. English PEN exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 1 84887 360 5
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 84887 576 0
eISBN: 978 0 85789 875 3
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For my son Felix
For Dominique
In the deep mid-afternoon, he stood illuminated by the sun like a holocaust on the graven plates of sacred history. Not all hares are alike, Jacinto, nor was it his fur that marked him out from other hares, believe me, nor his Tartar eyes, nor the peculiar shape of his ears. It was something that went far beyond what we humans call personality. The countless transmigrations his soul had endured had taught him, at the moments indicated to him by the complicity of God or some brazen angels, to render himself visible or invisible. For five whole minutes at noon he would stop at the same spot in the field, ears pricked, listening to something.
The deafening thunder of a waterfall that sets birds to flight, or the crackle of a forest blaze that terrified even the most foolhardy beast, would not have caused his eyes to dilate. The inconstant clamour of the world that he remembered, peopled with prehistoric animals, with temples that looked like withered trees, with futile, misbegotten wars, made him more temperamental and more cunning. One day he stopped as usual at the hour when the sun, at its zenith, poured down like lead on the trees, preventing them from casting shadows, and he heard barking, not of one dog, but of many, hurtling madly through the undergrowth. In a bound, the hare crossed the path and began to scurry away, the dogs giving chase, pell-mell, behind him. ‘Where are we headed?’ cried the hare in a voice that quavered like a lightning flash. ‘To the end of your life,’ howled the dogs in dogs’ voices.
The Golden Hare, Silvina Ocampo
Foreword
I have written a lot, pen in hand, throughout my life. And yet I dictated this book in its entirety, for the most part to the philosopher Juliette Simont, my assistant editor at Les Temps modernes and a very dear friend, and, when Juliette was occupied with her own work, to my secretary, Sarah Streliski, a talented writer. This is because I have experienced a strange and, I believe, somewhat rare adventure. Unlike most of the friends of my generation, who persist in clinging proudly to their pens and their spidery scrawl, I discovered, when I was given a computer shortly after my film Shoah was released in 1985, the extraordinary and entertaining possibilities of this machine, which I slowly learned to use and later mastered, if not all the possibilities it afforded, at least those features that were useful to me. When I was dictating, with Juliette next to me, both sitting before a large screen, I found it wonderful to see my thoughts immediately objectified, perfect in every word, with no deletions, no rough drafts. Gone were the problems I have always had with my own handwriting, which, in spite of the comments of those who thought it beautiful, to my eyes changed according to my mood, agitation or tiredness. I have often been sickened by my handwriting, which I found, to quote a remark by Sartre about his own, ‘sticky with all my juices’ – and he wrote so much that he must have known what he was talking about. And yet some insurmountable impediment had prevented me from fully embracing modernity. Moving directly from longhand to computer – having utterly avoided the typewriter – I found that I made very slow progress when working alone; I typed with one finger, I managed to objectify my thoughts, but what was sufficient for a police report was not practical for the work I envisaged, my hunt-and-peck typing disrupted the rhythm of my thoughts and killed the momentum. If I wanted successfully to conclude that terrifying task I had been grumbling about for so many years now, I needed an extension of myself, I needed other fingers. These belonged to Juliette Simont. But Juliette’s role was not limited to typing. I have been told a thousand times by a thousand different people that I ought to write the story of my life, that it was rich, multi-faceted and unique, and it deserved to be told. I agreed, I wanted to do it, but after the colossal effort that had gone into making Shoah, I was not sure I had the strength for such a massive undertaking. It was at this point that Juliette began typing or, what amounts to the same thing, insisting that I do something and stop prevaricating. And so one day I effortlessly dictated the first page to her, but waited months before moving on to page two, other urgent tasks taking precedence. I returned to it, but have been working on it seriously only for the past two years. While I dictated, Juliette was infinitely patient, respectful of my pensive, often lengthy silences, and her own silent, companionable presence itself inspired me. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that I express my gratitude.
I am also grateful to Sarah, who proved to be as patient as Juliette, and to my first readers, Dominique, Antoine Gallimard, Éric Marty and Ran Halévi, whose favourable reception encouraged me.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
A Note on the Author
Chapter 1
The guillotine – more generally, capital punishment and the various methods of meting out d
eath – has been the abiding obsession of my life. It began very early. I must have been about ten years old, and the memory of that cinema on the rue Legendre in the 17th arrondissement in Paris, with its red velvet seats and its faded gilt, remains astonishingly vivid. A nanny, making the most of my parents’ absence, had taken me, and the film that day was L’Affaire du courrier de Lyon [The Courier of Lyons], with Pierre Blanchar and Dita Parlo. I have never known or tried to discover the name of the director, but he must have been very proficient, for there are certain scenes that I have never forgotten: the attack on the Lyon courier’s stagecoach in a dark forest, the trial of Lesurques, innocent but condemned to death, the scaffold erected in the middle of a public square, white, as I remember it, the blade swooping down. Back then, as during the Revolution, people were still guillotined in public. For months afterwards, around midnight, I would wake up, terror-stricken, and my father would get up, come into my room, stroke my damp forehead, my hair wet with anxiety, talk to me and calm me. It was not just my head being cut off: sometimes I was guillotined lengthwise, in the way a pit-sawyer cuts wood, or like those astonishing instructions posted on the doors of goods wagons that, in 1914, were used to send men and animals to the front: ‘men 40 – horses (lengthwise) 8’, and which, after 1941, were used to send Jews to the distant chambers of their final agony. I was being sliced into thin, flat slivers, from shoulder to shoulder, passing through the crown of my head. The violence of these nightmares was such that as a teenager and even as an adult, fearful of reviving them, I superstitiously looked away or closed my eyes whenever a guillotine was depicted in schoolbooks, historical writing or newspapers. I’m not sure that I don’t still do so today. In 1938 – I was thirteen – the arrest and confession of the German murderer Eugen Weidmann had all of France on tenterhooks. Weidmann had murdered in cold blood, to steal and leave no witnesses, and, without needing to check, I can still remember the names of some of his victims: a dancer, Jean de Koven, a man named Roger Leblond, and others whom he buried in the forest of Fontainebleau, in the aptly named Bois de Fausses-Reposes – the Woods of False Repose. The newsreels, in great detail, showed the investigators searching the coppices, digging up the bodies. Weidmann was condemned to death and guillotined before the prison gate at Versailles in the summer before the war. There are famous photographs of the beheading. Much later I decided to look at them, and did so at length. His was the last public execution in France. Thereafter, the scaffold was erected inside the prison courtyard, until 1981 when, at the instigation of François Mitterrand and the then Minister of Justice, Robert Badinter, the death penalty was abolished. But, at thirteen, however, Weidmann, Lanzmann – the identical endings of his name and mine seemed to portend for me some terrible fate. Indeed, as I write these words, even at my supposedly advanced age, there is no guarantee that it will not still be so. The death penalty might be reinstated, all it would take is a change of regime, a vote in parliament, a grande peur. And of course the death penalty survives in many places: to travel is dangerous. I remember discussing it with Jean Genet, because of the dedication of Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs [Our Lady of the Flowers] to a young man, guillotined at the age of twenty – ‘Were it not for Maurice Pilorge, whose death continues to poison my life…’ – and also because Weidmann’s name opens the book: ‘Weidmann appeared to you in a five o’clock edition, head swathed in white strips of cloth, a nun and yet a wounded airman…’, and mentioning my abiding fear that I would die by the so-called bois de justice [the guillotine]. He replied brusquely, ‘There’s still time.’ He was right. He didn’t much like me; I felt exactly the same about him.
I have no neck. I have often wondered, during nocturnal moments of acute bodily awareness spent anticipating the worst, where the blade would have to fall to behead me cleanly. I could think only of my shoulders and my aggressively defensive posture, forged gradually night after night by the nightmares that followed the primal scene of Lesurques’ death, which transformed them into a fighting bull’s morillo, neck muscles so impenetrable the blade glances off, sending it back to its point of origin, each rebound weakening its original power. It is as though, over time, I had drawn in on myself so as to leave for the blade of la veuve – the widow, as Madame Guillotine is colloquially known – no convenient place and no opportunity for it to make one. In the boxing world, they would say I grew up in a ‘crouch’, with a curvature of the torso so marked that an opponent’s fists slide off without the punches truly hitting home.
The truth is that throughout my whole life, and without a moment’s respite, the evening before an execution (if I was aware of it, as I frequently was during the Algerian War), and the day after in the case of a non-political capital punishment, were nights and days of distress during which I compelled myself to anticipate or relive the last moments – the hours, the minutes, the seconds – of the condemned men, regardless of the reasons for the fatal verdict. The warders’ felt slippers whispering along death row; the sudden clang of cell-door bolts slammed back, the prisoner, haggard, waking with a start, the prosecutor, the lawyer, the chaplain, the ‘be brave’, the glass of rum, the handover to the executioner and his aides and the sudden lurch to naked violence, the brutal acceleration of the final sequence: arms lashed behind the back, ankles crudely hobbled with a length of rope, shirt quickly slit with scissors to expose the neck, the prisoner manhandled, shouted at, then hauled, feet dragging along the ground, to the door, now suddenly thrown open, overlooking the machine, standing tall, waiting, in the ashen dawn of the prison courtyard. Yes, I know all these things. With Simone de Beauvoir I would be summoned to the offices of Jacques Vergès around nine o’clock at night where he would inform us that an Algerian was to be executed at dawn in some prison – Fresnes or La Santé in Paris, Oran or Constantine in Algeria – and we would spend the night trying to find someone who might contact someone else, who in turn might dare to disturb the sleep of Général de Gaulle, plead with him to spare this poor wretch to whom he had already refused clemency, consciously sending him to the scaffold. At the time, Vergès was head of a collective of lawyers from the Front de libération national (FLN) who practised what they called ‘la defense de rupture’, refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the French courts’ jurisdiction over the Algerian combatants, which resulted in some of their clients being more speedily dispatched to the guillotine. Very late one night, under the cold eye of Vergès, Le Castor (as Simone de Beauvoir was nicknamed) and I, gripped by the same sense of extreme urgency, managed to reach François Mauriac. A man was about to die, he had to be saved, what had been done might yet be undone. Mauriac understood everything, but he also knew that one did not wake de Gaulle and that, in any case, it would make no difference: it was too late, unquestionably. To Vergès, who was well aware of the futility of our attempts, our presence in his offices on the eve of these executions was a political strategy. One to which we consented, given that, from the first, we had militated in favour of Algerian independence, but to me the sense of the irreversible won out over everything else, becoming unbearable as the fatal hour approached. Time divided and negated itself like a gallop seen in slow motion: this scheduled death was endlessly about to take place. As in that space where Achilles can never catch up with the tortoise, so the minutes and seconds were infinitely subdivided, bringing the torment of imminence to its apogee. Vergès, notified of the execution by telephone, put an end to our waiting and in the early hours of morning, in the rain, de Beauvoir and I regularly found ourselves defeated, empty, without any plan, as though the guillotine had also decapitated our future.
When, in order to demoralize his own people and discourage further plots against him, Hitler ordered that the conspirators of 20 July 1944 be executed one after another, it became clear that the speed at which the executioners would have to work would compromise the precision and the concentration required for the ancient method of beheading by axe, the standard means of capital punishment in Germany. On 22 February 1943, the heroes of die Weiss
e Rose (the White Rose) – Hans Scholl, his sister Sophie and their friend Christoph Probst – died in their twenties beneath the executioner’s axe in Stadelheim Prison, Munich, after a summary trial lasting barely three hours, conducted by the sinister Roland Freisler, the Reich’s public prosecutor who had come specially from Berlin. Immediately the verdict was announced, they were put to death in a dungeon in Stadelheim, and Hans, as he laid his head on the block still red with his sister’s blood, cried, ‘Long live freedom!’ Even today I cannot call to mind those three handsome, pensive young faces without tears welling in my eyes: the seriousness, the dignity, the determination, the spiritual force, the extraordinary courage of the solitude that emanates from each of them, all speak to their being the best, the honour of Germany, the best of humanity. The 20 July conspirators were the first to die by the German guillotine: unlike its French counterpart – slender, tall and spectacular, lending itself both to being elegantly draped and to literature – the German version is squat, ungainly, four-square, easy to set up in a low-ceilinged room; consequently the blade, which has no time to pick up speed, is enormously heavy, and I am not sure that, like ours, it has a bevelled edge: its efficacy is due entirely to its weight. It was Freisler once again who acted as prosecutor at the trial of the 20 July conspirators in Berlin. In fact, he held every role: public prosecutor and presiding judge, he made the opening statements, questioned the witnesses and summed up against the accused. Their trial was filmed for Nazi propaganda purposes, to edify the public and ridicule those about to be guillotined.
Fouquier-Tinville during the Reign of Terror, Vychinsky, the prosecutor of Stalin’s show-trials in Moscow, the Czech prosecutor Urválek, barking like a dog at the Slánský trial, Freisler – they all descend from the same stock of bureaucratic butchers, unfailing in their service to their masters of the moment, affording the accused no chance, refusing to listen to them, insulting them, directing the evidence to a sentence that was decided before the trial began. In the footage of the 20 July trial Freisler can be seen, his face convulsed in feigned fury, cutting short the élite aristocratic officers and generals of the Wehrmacht, who are busy hiking up their trousers, which, having neither belt nor buttons, keep slipping comically to their knees, as the prosecutor moves from outrage to threats of contempt of court. But no one is laughing: the tortures suffered by the poor wretches before the trial, and the knowledge, etched on their faces, that they will die in the coming hours, set their features into unutterably tragic masks in which incomprehension vies with despair. The account of their beheading, in a dungeon in Moabit Prison in Berlin (which still stands, in the Alte Moabit district), is appalling: Freisler’s victims had to queue up to die, hands bound, ankles fettered by their own trousers, they were suddenly seized by the stocky executioner’s aides, who directed them either to right or to left – using an SS technique perfected elsewhere – for two guillotines were operating side by side beneath the low ceiling, amid screams of terror, the last shouts of defiance, amid the stench of blood and shit. In Moabit, there is no place for the beautiful – too beautiful – travelling shot the director Andrzej Wajda offers in his film Danton, where, in the midst of the Reign of Terror, Danton returns from Arcis-sur-Aube where he has spent several nights of passion with his mistress, arriving at the place de Grève at dawn, his barouche describing a perfect arc around the quiescent guillotine, elegantly draped in a long ribbon of night that, since it does not hide it completely, allows the ‘Indulgent’ a glimpse of the bevelled edge of the naked blade, a grim forewarning. Alejo Carpentier’s description, in the magnificent opening pages of El Siglo de Las Luces [Explosion in a Cathedral] is – no pun intended – of a different calibre: there Victor Hugues, a Commissaire of the Republic, former public prosecutor at Rochefort and a fervent admirer of Robespierre, brings with him to the Antilles both the decree – enacted on 6 Pluviôse, Year II – that will abolish slavery, and the first guillotine: ‘But the empty doorway stood in the bows, reduced to a mere lintel and its supports, with the set-square, the inverted half-pediment upended, the black triangle with its bevel of cold steel suspended between the uprights… Here the Door stood alone, facing into the night… its diagonal blade gleaming, its wooden uprights framing a whole panorama of stars.’
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