The master has never really taken seriously what we in the office term ‘the French expedition’, though he still would have liked to be able to build here and had no reason to discourage Rice. Also, he was happy to give both Dronţu and I the chance to go abroad for a year. We drew straws and I was first.
‘Good: you go this year, next year Dronţu.’
It’s been about a year now. I waited for Marin to take my place, but he hasn’t come. He sent me a letter exactly four lines long, the first I’ve received since his wedding.
‘I can’t come. Married man, too tied up. Good luck over there. I miss you, pal, and wish I could see you. Marjorie sends her regards. She’ll write to you one of these days.’
She’ll write to you one of these days. No, Marjorie won’t write. I know it, and so does Marin.
So, one more year.
*
At the office on Boulevard Haussmann, I sometimes run into Pierre Dogany. He’s doing a doctorate in public and company law here. He struggled as much as he could in Budapest and left when he saw it wasn’t working out. Though he intends to return there as soon as he’s completed his thesis. He’s determined to be a Hungarian whatever it costs, whatever it takes. His excess of zeal bores me. I sense he regrets that letter he sent me two years ago in Bucharest. He doesn’t forgive me for remembering so well his disillusionment with being Hungarian. He wishes he’d never complained to me of having to put up with being persecuted, oppressed and hounded, and having the very fact of being a Hungarian questioned. This relentless devotion seems excessive to me.
He invited me to the university last week, to hear a paper at Lapradelle’s seminar on international law. He spoke about the legal side of the affairs of those who opted for Romania and, as Lapardelle was legal adviser to the Hungarians at The Hague, the whole meeting was an indictment of the Romanian side of the argument. I felt bad and though I lacked the hard information, dates, figures, I felt the need for a counter-argument. To my delight, it was made by a Romanian student in the hall who, once Dogany had finished his lecture, took the lectern and spoke from there for a full half-hour, his eyes flashing at times with a passion such as has probably never been seen in that cold lecture hall.
I went up to him on the way out to introduce myself.
He introduced himself to me as Saul Berger. I was almost repelled by the facile symbolism of this, too obvious to ignore, and too melodramatic for my taste: two Jews fighting each other for nothing more than abstract victories. Destiny, inevitable destiny.
*
Blidaru asks me in his last letter when I plan to return home. He has reserved a site in Snagov through the teachers’ association and he’d like me to build him a house there.
I replied par avion.
‘I don’t know when I’ll be back, but when I am it’ll be I who builds the house. Wait, professor. You’ll have to. It’s too great a pleasure for me to miss.’
3
Maurice Buret returned yesterday from Normandy, where he had, at Oizy-sur-Glaive, a 25-day sojourn. He’s happy with the harvest he’s brought back, so happy that he’s renounced the usual modest smile with which he usually excuses his victories. He had two successes in Oizy, both of them beauties, and he now animatedly but methodically recounts them to me, in numbered chapters.
1) Doctor Sibier.
2) Register of income.
1) Doctor Sibier is the medic he was substituting for.
He went on holiday to the south of France and then asked Paris for an intern to substitute for him.
As chance would have it, they sent Buret.
‘From the outset,’ recounts Maurice, ‘I knew he was no ordinary fellow. He had two paintings in his house, a Braque and a Marie Laurencin, which in Oizy isn’t just an act of courage, it’s a provocation. A Parisian, thirty-six years old, intelligent – what’s this man doing there, in that provincial backwater, in a town of 8,000 people, alone, without connections, without memories, without hopes? I asked the driver, I asked the nurse, I asked various patients who came along. Nobody could explain it to me. So I had to take up various means of private investigation and I opened the lower drawers of his bureau. He hadn’t left me the keys, but I managed well enough with a knife. I found a stack of letters of no great interest, a few ordinary photos and, finally, an intimate diary. Some 600 pages. I read it all over two nights. Well, it’s extraordinary. I tell you, ex-tra-ord-in-ar-y, and I mean it. You’re going to read it too, and you’ll see.’
‘How, did you bring the notebooks?’
‘Ah, no. What am I, a brigand? I just read them, and transcribed the essential passages. Anyway, I had nothing much to do in the evenings. I transcribed them, then put them back in the drawer. Two days before the return of the doctor, I called a locksmith from the town to repair the damage. Nothing suspicious at all, everything in order.
2) ‘Doctor Sibier returned to Oizy on the evening of the 10th, and I had to leave at dawn the following day. I handed over the register of takings in which the consultations and money received were recorded. I counted out eighteen notes of 1,000 and a few notes of a hundred. I counted out eighteen, though there were only seventeen. A thousand remained in my wallet. Don’t ask me why. It amused me to do it, apart from the fact that 1,000 francs is 1,000 francs.’
‘He could find you out.’
‘“Find me out”! Ugly expression. He could observe a small error in calculation, you mean. Possibly, but he hasn’t observed it.’
‘He might yet.’
‘Obviously. I expect a letter from him today or tomorrow.’
‘And what are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know. Depends on the letter.’
Indeed, Doctor Sibier’s letter arrived.
It seems to me you have made a small error in your calculations. I’m not certain and, believe me, I dislike bothering you for such a minor matter, but I can’t account for a thousand francs. Is it possible that we’ve missed something or, conversely, noted the same figure twice?
Maurice replied immediately. He doesn’t know if there was an error, but, if there was then he is responsible and ready therefore to immediately send on the missing sum. ‘Whether it is 1,000 or 10,000 francs, it would not be too much to retain a trust which is more valuable to me than anything.’
Eighteen hours later, he received a reply by telegram.
Don’t send anything. It was not a question of you for a moment. A thousand apologies.
‘Look, this is what’s called solid good manners,’ concluded Buret, waving the doctor’s telegram.
Though I am aware of the total moral vacuum in which he lives, I’ve once again sought explanations. Maurice isn’t just some debauchee, and nor is he impulsive. He proceeds with utter calm and takes complete responsibility for his actions. It’s awkward to talk of ‘conscience’, but I’m interested in how this fellow’s head works and his system of reflection and self-examination, that private space where we each one of us judges, absolves or condemns ourselves.
‘Oh, my conscience works excellently. Like a good lung, like a good stomach. My conscience can handle the most serious crises. It’s because I don’t fool myself and I don’t make a moral problem out of a practical one. Ever played football? I have. You’ll be familiar with the general principle at any rate: getting the ball in the back of your opponent’s net. The main thing is not to touch the ball with your hands. Perfect. If you want to play football, you have to submit to this rule. If you don’t accept the rule, don’t play. Simple. But it’s one thing to accept a rule and it’s another thing to b
elieve in it. Whether or not you touch the ball is in itself unimportant and meaningless. It only acquires sense in the context of the game. But a moralist who takes up football won’t delay in pronouncing on the transcendental nature of handling the ball. Well, I don’t go in for that kind of thing. You see, the notion of “sin” is for me an abstraction. There’s no such thing as “sin”. There’s only such a thing as “tactlessness”.’
*
I’ve been in Buret’s home but twice, back when he lived with his mother, in their apartments in the Rue Vouillet. On both occasions, I felt I was inconveniencing him. He closed doors carefully after himself and led me hurriedly through the corridor, towards his room. At one point, through a half-open door, I caught sight of a lady and greeted her awkwardly, not knowing if I should introduce myself. ‘It’s nothing, a friend,’ he told her casually, in passing – and carried on by.
He talks of so many things with me but has never mentioned his family. This is a private area and out of bounds. Abundant conversations about women, books, friends. But nothing about what lies beyond, that is deep, constant and enduring in the spirit of his family, who have long been settled in Paris, yet remain Bretons. For all his apparent cordiality, his terrible discretion, his passion for conversations and ‘cases’, Buret is still a private, self-possessed and reserved individual. I’ve never caught him in a moment of depression or joy that has caused him to speak imprudently, or even freely and without reserve. What is called ‘the need to open oneself up’ is completely foreign to him. He doesn’t experience outpourings of emotion. At most he has considered sympathies. Somewhere, in his private life, a censor checks every word, suspects every impulse, cools every enthusiasm. A ring of steel protects his strictly personal secrets from attack.
Last week, out of the blue, he said to me: ‘I’ve moved. I live on my own now. I’ve decided, with Mama’s agreement, for us to live apart.’
I was taken aback. Less by the news itself than the fact that he was sharing it with me.
‘Why?’
(I had asked out of politeness, for the sake of a response, not believing he’d give me the reason. I’ve no particular talent for extracting confessions. But, to my surprise, he responded in some detail.)
‘I don’t know how it happened. For some time I’ve felt it’s no longer right. There’s a silent pressure that exerts itself, more upon my thoughts than upon my personal affairs. Anybody who says they’re free in their parents’ house is fooling themselves.
‘You know, I think I could live easily enough with Father. He’s a cold person and that doesn’t bother me. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken more than five words to him at a time. I’m indifferent to him. We don’t love each other. But with Mama it’s endlessly difficult. We love each other, and that’s intolerable. I’m good at dealing with adversity, but I can’t stand strong affections. Adversity forces me to define myself. Love, on the other hand, is indulgent, ready with sentimental transactions, ready with false amenability. Love in families, in particular, where the bonds are old, durable and invisible. I explained all this to Mother. I don’t know if she understood, but she accepted it anyway. We’ve concluded a treaty of mutual understanding: we’ll see each other twice a week.’
Maurice Buret, without his physical presence, his modest and attentive smile, without the intelligence that enables him to simulate sensitivity and emotion, would be a horrible character. Clarity, order … Is that enough to make a person? God knows how long I’ve stumbled after such order, how many shadows I’ve wrestled with for such clarity. But isn’t this kind of victory too sterile, too arid?
I take my revenge by transcribing Descartes:
… ne recevoir jamais aucune chose pour vraie que je ne la connusse évidemment être telle, c’est-à-dire éviter soigneusement la précipitation et la prévention et … ne comprendre rien de plus en mes jugements que ce qui se présenterait si clairement et si distinctement à mon esprit que je n’eusse aucune occasion de la mettre en doute.
What a miserly rule.
4
In Boulevard Haussmann, at the Rice offices, I was met by an extraordinary character: Phillip Dunton. I had to embrace him. He was unprepared for such a show of feeling and was rather taken aback, standing there with his pipe in his mouth.
‘Forgive me, Phill, it’s just I’m so glad to see you …’
He’s straight in from Romania and his arrival has somehow awoken in me a thousand images of over there – of people, streets, newspapers, cafés, the whole thing, everything that slowly faded away here, where I’ve been subject to so many new impressions. Phillip Dunton is a meticulous, slow-talking fellow (a habit I’d say he has picked up from chess, where you need a quarter-hour to consider each move). I bombarded him with questions and he didn’t know which to answer first.
He’s going to spend a few days here until old Ralph turns up, as he soon must.
He doesn’t really know what he’ll do after that. He’s certainly not going back to Uioara, where there’s no longer any work for him. He’s going to try to get a year’s leave from Rice Enterprises so he can go to America to complete some laboratory experiments and personal observations. Possibly to publish there the study which he completed a draft of in Uioara. When the year’s up he’ll go to any place Rice sends him. Anywhere: but he’d prefer Russia.
We lunched together, me impatient to hear him talk, he as calm and relaxed as I remember him. I could hardly restrain myself from asking about Marjorie, but I feared opening a well-guarded wound. My fears were unfounded. He spoke about Marjorie when he remembered her, effortlessly and without embarrassment. He considers what has happened to be straightforward. They’ve separated as good friends. He attended her civil marriage ceremony and she, three weeks later, saw him to the station.
‘It never for a moment occurred to me that I might have trouble with Marjorie. She truly is intelligent and, really, that’s what allowed us to stay married so many years. We couldn’t have asked for more. I knew she’d leave one day and for a long period the only question for me was with whom it would be. When we met at Uioara, I thought you might be the one. I watched you with a fair degree of interest and – please believe me – a fair degree of sympathy. I don’t know why, but nothing happened. Then, when Pierre Dogany appeared, I thought it would be him. I confess, it didn’t cross my mind once that it could be Marin Dronţu. I laughed when I realized: it seemed grotesque. Now, though, with the passage of time, I see it was a piece of luck. Poor Pierre Dogany has the great disadvantage of being in love with Marjorie, but what she needs is to love, not to be loved. And she loves Dronţu. You should have seen her leaving the Town Hall on his arm: she was radiant.
‘She’s a good partner. I don’t think I’ll ever forget her and I wouldn’t swear that I won’t ever go back to Romania to see her and talk of all that’s passed.’
*
Old Ralph T. Rice came for a couple of days and brought the master’s response to my report. In theory, my viewpoint has been accepted. If work starts, it will be in Dieppe. The advantages of the site are obvious, and there are no commercial disadvantages over Le Havre. But will work start? Hard to say. The Crash has given him a bad fright. What scares him even more than the Crash is the mood in Romania.
‘You’ve only been away a year,’ he said, ‘but if you went back now there’s much you’d no longer recognize. Something’s going on over there. Something’s brewing.’
A final decision on the fate of the French project won’t be taken until later, towards autumn, when I hope the situation will be clearer. But the decision to scale back the project from
what was originally planned seems already to have been taken. Possibly a network of small sales and distribution points will be set up throughout France and an attempt made to promote Rice petrol and oil in the motoring world. Modest enough, compared to what we once wanted to do.
I tried to get a clearer idea of why the old man – usually so calm and strong-willed – is alarmed. I inquired at length, but he was unable to tell me much. Not even Phillip Dunton, so nonchalant and sceptical about ‘serious events’, knew very much.
It seems Uioara has experienced some trouble over the past year: a number of small strikes, not serious in themselves but recurrent, as well as tussles between workers and management and a series of negotiations about wages. Along with the eternal outbursts from the people of Uioara concerning their eternal plum trees whenever a new well is sunk and yet another wave of drilling mud is misdirected. But Ralph Rice isn’t the kind of man to be rattled by such trifles. There must be something else lurking in the background. I’m going to write to the master to ask.
For Two Thousand Years Page 17