Constantly under her inspection, I was conscious of new facial resources: careless, stricken, insouciant, would-be mysterious, none of which she appeared to notice, chasing her own quick chatter. Did I realize … ? Could I not see … ? Surely … ?
She shrugged away Mon Général, calling him a blind oculist on cracked sticks, almost as pitiful as Bardot. The Conference was a publishers’ racket. Reading little, she thought of Camus only as an Algerian goalkeeper. Americans she admired, even a few outside Hollywood. ‘They rush through. Full-throated.’ An embargo was placed on my historical anecdotes, and my nose for street names deplored. Place du Colonel-Fabien, rue Descartes, rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. ‘Mouldy things. Forget them, please.’ They were insignificant as McCarthy, Cold War, Reconstruction, the Conference, my concern for them perverse.
Despite my exasperation, this somehow made her droll, even witty. When I referred to the war, she mischievously demanded, ‘Who won?’, the question later sounding less silly than I had thought. I dared not risk her chortle at the White Rose or her bemused incredulity, real or adopted, at my pilgrimage to the Conciergerie. I desisted from asking her to traipse through Père Lachaise in reverence to mouldy things: Maupassant, Baudelaire, Wilde. She insisted that recent weather forecasts were politically coded: disturbance over Biscay meant detection of a nuclear submarine, thundery rain, the expectation of riots. Her eyes widened within circles of mascara. I must realize …
For myself, a chrysalis prepared for marvellous change, she was professionally unexceptional, assisting some very junior movie executive, assisting, as it were, the assistant, seeking bit parts, rewarded with an occasional crowd scene or line of dialogue. Like most of us, she wanted more. More money, more adventure, more applause. I would have preferred her to have a career less raffish and open to plunder: her invitations from unnamed producers, jobless directors, hungry script-writers aggrieved me like Wilfrid’s telephonists treating him like a doctor on call. She might be laid nightly, over-drinking, over-dancing, under-dressing, stroking the hairy cheeks of the ass-headed or straggled and pierced by a troll eager for more. ‘Bon appetit,’ she would say, insinuating depraved pleasure. ‘Nous les gosses.’
Unaffected by our disdain, Conference arrangements were being finalized. Lord Russell had been voted into the shared presidency; something of a prima donna, he then resigned, but, to a blast of publicity, recanted. Good wishes came from Robert Schuman, former premier, resistance leader, whose Plan had internationalized West European coal, iron, steel: from Willi Brandt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, Aldous Huxley, André Malraux. Opponents howled that Malraux, writer, explorer, art critic, film-maker, Gaullist, was class traitor. Humanité reiterated the accusation of anti-Soviet conspiracy and proposed a Peace Rally in Cairo, where revolution had destroyed the monarchy, republican generals anxious for support from both Washington and Moscow, already disputing with London over the Canal Zone. An article, unsigned, but attributed to Simone de Beauvoir, alleged American Zionist hopes of sabotaging the only realistic instrument of peace, the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact. A transport strike was threatened. ‘Dollar Princess’ was splashed on Martha Gellhorn’s car; a neo-fascist royalist sheet sneered that the Conference was sullied by pacifists, Freemasons, Jews, failed Olympic athletes and tennis players from a fetid nest miscalling itself Toute Vie. Wilfrid, like others, received threats, one on fragrant, crinkling paper ennobled with crossed swords, anonymously accused him of being subsidized by Mexico. This was a bizarre addition to references overheard at parties, theatres or seen in gossip columns: he had been observed in Rome, with Via Margutta artists, had lectured at the American University, Beirut, once, hugely smiling, had been mistaken for a maharajah in Lausanne.
How had Suzie first met him? Shaded by a marble cascading Neptune, she flicked my hand, slightly husky against the splash, her faintly yellow face half concealed by the smoked, ovalled glasses.
‘What matter? He just appeared beside me in the Tuileries. I was learning a part. Actually, half a line. “Your hat, monsieur …”’ Her giggle was unmelodious, she stood, legs apart, smiling up at me as if delivering the hat and expecting too many francs. ‘Almost no one was around. He seemed to have pushed away the air to continue a talk. With anyone else … Well, men! I see straight, my fine Erich, I don’t miss a horse in the yard. Most just want my rear end. But he was like a family lawyer you see in ancient plays, who settles the will, finds the papers, keeps everyone to the final curtain. Though’ – her voice went brittle as she shrugged – ‘I’ve lost family. Stupidity … Anyway, he made some remark about a vanished palace, but, quite soon, very strange, he strolled away, asking for nothing. Yet, next week I was back, counting tulips, and, just imagine, he was there, not near me, actually walking away. I had to run after him. He was very polite, not exactly deferential but never almighty or sniffy. And, do you know, he did me a conjuring trick. He told me I was being considered for a role, in the new Gabin. Yet, think of it, I didn’t remember telling him anything! Certainly not about work. But that very evening, God in Heaven, out of oblivion the offer came. Only sitting at a desk and saying the Gabin character was busy. But Gabin himself, at close quarters smaller than I had expected …’
Resenting her in such quarters, I did not listen until, grasping my arm, she moved us away. Glasses removed, her eyes were amused. ‘I don’t see Wilfrid often. Once he took me and another girl to a gallery. Très aristo. I behaved not too well, said the stuff, sculptures, had insufficient bone. How awful!’ Her artificial shudder could have been rehearsal for Gabin, her hands spread like a fan. ‘The nudes, birds, abstracts. The sculptor, on the card, was called Gaxotte. But, tell you what, I thought, while not quite believing, that Wilfrid had done them himself.’
I hurried alone to the gallery, in a fashionable area, but the catalogue only revealed that Gaxotte had exhibited abroad and lived in France. The curator refused to divulge more. Spare, pale grey, taut and angular, heads blank, the exhibits had some, if inconclusive, resemblance to Wilfrid’s collection but nothing further. He remained impossible to question, iconic, motionless as if at prayer, surveying the microscopic but exact tints of a Bokharan miniature or a Brancusi bird, cut smooth without blandness, poised in calm exposition of line, alternately curved and straight, still, yet about to tremble into flight, the head imperious yet unearthly.
An article in Les Temps modernes, exalting the roman novelle had thumb-nosed the classic novels with their perpetual ‘and then … and then …’, but, for that summer, my days were just that: and then. Each day with Suzie was renewal, a birthday. In rue de Rivoli, under lingering sunset and long shadows, she brattishly stuck tongue out, not at Brancusi but at a plaster Jeanne d’Arc in a Maison Doré window, then lewdly gesticulated at a poster cartoon of de Gaulle, as Wild Man of Martinique. Why Martinique? She responded as if to the witless. ‘Explanations don’t explain.’ Flushed, oddly vindictive. ‘I’ll turn up to laugh at his funeral.’
Despite her rapture at brilliant scarves, flamboyant shirts and the hot, powerfully lit studios, she insisted on avoiding the crowded and voguish – Bar Meraude, Tournon – for dim Left Bank places where youths with frilled cuffs, swollen rings, string ties, glowered at serious students, lounged over empty cups, eyed ageing women with little-girl voices; or cellar pit reeking with fumes, for easy tunes and dances, myself the slower, less inventive. She suspected I lived in unwholesome luxury and was, I thought, mocking, attempting to please me, yet securing her escape-routes. I had no ready-made analysis; she was in and out of reality, like my toys’ escapades while I slept in the Turret. Girls wove life differently, sometimes abruptly aged.
Once she darted, as if alarmed, into a sepulchral bouquiniste in rue de Seine, hurriedly rummaging, head cocked, mouth pursed amongst embroidered stools, cracked busts, chess-sets, snuff-boxes, yellowing prints that Mirabeau could have seen. First charming, then dismaying the patronne, she purchased nothing, refusing my offer of a jade dragon she particularly liked, then pouting at m
y refusal to buy for Wilfrid a Maltravé harp with all strings missing. She ridiculed my interest in a waxen bouquet under a glass dome, old, yet fresh as if just delivered to some finely laundered hand. Hoch die Kaiserin. Vive l’Impératrice. We surged into hilarity at hearing of a Pittsburgh magnate received in audience at the Vatican and wondering whether to tip the Pope; at excavations in the Saint-Anne-des-Bois nunnery producing a quorum of baby bones; at the gypsy gaoled for impersonating Victor Mature and subscribing his profits to a group demanding unilateral French disarmament; a parrot outside Saint-Sulpice squawking ‘Money Talks’. Our frictions still thrilled. A swift red tinge in the Bois, a fox; Certainly not. She stamped. ‘You never agree. You’re Prussian, know nothing of pain. No, not Prussian. You are …’ her small face tightened, as if to spit, I brace myself for the knock-out, ‘English!’ Then caressing me, not repentant but instantly forgetting. But once, following mirth at a woman arguing with a dog, she clenched hands, muttering in coarse, unidentifiable patois. ‘I’ve a right to be present,’ glaring at me but surely accusing someone else. ‘I don’t need certificate for breathing. It’s you that’s bad breath.’
The nearer one approaches, the more the other recedes, at times, goaded by her talkative reticences; I remembered a message from one of Wilfrid’s thick books, that, approaching a woman, you should not forget the whip. An approach to Suzie best left unstated.
Bed hovered above our jaunty duels, an instrument waiting to be played. My body stung, but she was reshaping me. I was finding capacities for outright laughs, for showing emotion, for turning shoulder to the violent, suffering past. Her gibes enlivened.
‘Like German philosophers …’ she named none, ‘you’re too slow. That’s not incurable.’ Then glimmered with caustic amusement. ‘Bon appetit when you sharpen your crayon.’ Tantalizing in ambiguity, enclosing my literary hopes, which I exaggerated with her, my dislike of ‘commitment’, my sexual awkwardness. Foreheads touching, hands brushing, a glance reproachful or affectionate was part of a campaign of mined terrain, camouflaged marsh, sunken roads, deceptive salience, misread maps, injudicious feints, raids that might explosively recoil. Many battles are fought from mistaken premises, as though, by gnawing a book, a dog learns to read Nietzsche.
Marc-Henri, guessing more than was comfortable, advised with swarthy sans-culotte animality, his glibness hinting at unwholesome practices. ‘You should never let them know you’re satisfied, expect their gratitude, admit needing pity.’
August closed in blue heat. Wilfrid, digressing from the Conference, a fortnight ahead, suggested that, just possibly, I might care to accompany him to Bonn. ‘A few matters to dispose of. Not of the first importance, conforming to the Spanish proverb that cash in the pocket is a good Catholic. You might care to meet …’ Adenauer, no doubt, Otto John, Willi Brandt. In post-masturbation ennui I reflected that the excursion would cancel several dates elsewhere and mumbled neither assent nor refusal, though his appreciative smile intimated that he accepted the latter. Shamed by his acknowledgement of the superior claims of my own business, I at once – And then - wished to retract, but, waiving all claims, he had already smiled himself away. That he might genuinely need my company did not then occur to me. I preferred to be shrinking from his anxiety to procure me some post in the Allied Administration, a UN commission, a chance to trail some ex-Nazi aspirant to high office or, such was his taste, that I should apply for a bishopric.
Self-accusations of lethargy, shirking, lack of being, nagged like a cyst. Once, in a sort of cabin fever, I had craved to pursue the girl who ran, ride with the Herr General to feast with the Reichsmarschall, tramp the Black Forest seeking Erl-King or slim huntress. This had shrunk to hopes of a pert French girl opening her legs. On Wilfrid’s departure, with Paris seething with Conference anticipations and discord, I was splayed with images of foreboding. A withered hand upheld at crossroads, tests set by dwarf with a secret name, an insignificant quest, a bladed wind against which I was powerless to struggle. A foreboding as though dredged from wayward childhood reading and displaying, hung over Paris, the black hood and yellow claws of an Exterminating Angel.
7
Severely suited prominentes moved in informal measures with Special Correspondents, Academicians, Toute Vie initiates, embassy officials, preparing to nudge the future. Emblems shone – a starry French African robe, a green turban – bows and handshakes were being exchanged, affable demeanours were tinged with some complacency. The spectacle swelled to a champagne bubble, voices almost sang, in diffusions of delicate pink and flecked-gold light beneath a lofty Renaissance ceiling enscrolled with a further Conference, naked celestials languidly conversing at a forest pool, while putti dodged between roseate clouds. In contrast, on a green marble pillar, discreetly illuminated, presided a blown-up portrait of a head: bald crown, grooved face narrowing towards the chin, powerful eyes. Ernst Wiechert, recently dead, whose home had, notoriously, been plundered by French occupation troops in Germany. East Prussian schoolteacher and famed novelist, much admired by Wilfrid, Iron Cross veteran, sent to Buchenwald for treason, he had once urged massed students, watched by Himmler himself, to unite in global fellowship, respect for truth, individual freedom, an imagination free of past angers.
Amongst the students could have been the Scholl brother and sister, of the White Rose. To Himmler’s visible fury, Wiechert confessed that he saw some good in his enemies, blemishes in his friends. Austere, stubborn, his etherealized presence sanctioned whatever might come.
From outside, commotion, now a heaving growl, now a single outcry. That morning Humanité had red headlines accusing the Conference as cat’s paw of the Pentagon and CIA. An article by Sartre ‘in the spirit of the Resistance’ had declared that by being anti-revolution the Conference must be anti-life, was today countered by another, signed ‘AC’, identified as Camus, comparing Sartre’s resistance to the Occupation to the tail-wag of a mouse. The transport strike had not occurred, though rumours of bombs and raucous demonstrations caused the police to line the forecourt. Picasso’s communist Dove of Peace was pasted on walls, memorials, doors. The week had pulsed with threats and recriminations. Lifts, stairs, corridors were guarded by police, un-uniformed hirelings, vigilantes. An envelope on the pavement could contain powder, church bells be a tocsin.
Marc-Henri, throughout, was dourly unconcerned. ‘Sensible fellow,’ Wilfrid said, though I, too, remained much the same.
Wilfrid had departed before breakfast, so I left unaccompanied. Fearing the disorders, I would have carried a knobbed stick but for anticipation of an ironic lift of his eyebrow and offer of an escort with cannon.
The immediate streets were dense with police, attempted pickets, rival partisans. Sliding through shaken fists, hoots, stamping, I was soon rather pompously exhilarated, as though at last under fire. Banners jostled, a Red wind: Yanks Go Home, Peace Without Dollars, Jerusalem for the Arabs. I sniffed history from faces swollen and enflamed as Marat’s, stampedes from the old Revolutionary Sections – Saint-Antoine, Faubourg Saint-Monceau – howls for the Republic of Equals, a whiff from Les Halles pungent as the Chicago stockyards. Braced by the uproar, I hoped I was proud, composed, subtly within great events. Wedged in one street, agitators of the Right-wing UDCA, pledged against Marxist Jews and traitors, were waving placards agitating against internationalism and demanding the rights of small shopkeepers in a purified France. Such crowds gave fierce tonic to the loves and hatreds jostling within the giant skull of Europe, my sudden fervour delighting in such phrases.
Not as descendent of Pahlen, scarcely as Resistance legionary, but as ‘secretary’, I had place amongst notables. Most wore name badges. Martin Büber, Zionist and philosopher, small, spectacled; the American author, Lionel Trilling, tall, elegant, diffidently smiling above a pale green bow-tie: Rudolf Augstein, editor of Der Spiegel, which he called ‘the assault battery of Democracy’, and who had been wounded on the Eastern Front. A Canadian bishop, Toute Vie publicist, promised me a ticket for his
Liberal Pacificism lecture. The Gandhist Socialist, Mr J. Narayan, grinned in abstruse complicity, perhaps mistaking me for a hunger-marcher. His mauve, silk jacket, off-white trousers and jewelled fly-whisk, contrasting some tail-coats and sashes, gave him an endearing clownishness.
Surrounded by top journalists, Golda Meier, Israeli delegate, was demanding water as if declaring war on Egypt. Less vehement, twice as tall, was the Norwegian architect, Odd Nansen, son of Fridtjof, whom Gorky had once called the Conscience of Europe: he had dismissed the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 as a futile attempt to restore a dead era and declared that the difficult takes a little while to accomplish, the impossible a little longer. The son had suffered Sachsenhausen concentration camp as hostage for King Haakon. Watched by two polished Orientals, impersonal as fish, he was discussing with a Swedish surgeon, cousin of Björn Prutz, who, in London, 1940, was reputed to have discussed peace terms with ministers behind Churchill’s back.
I overheard that Hans Mayer, East German Marxist, had been seen, thus in defiance of his government. Golo Mann, historian, son of Thomas, was being photographed with Gérard Philipe, anxious, very intent, with the pout he had adopted for Caligula, in Camus’ play. Flashlights were incessant, netting me as if I were being sought by makers of realms, alongside such guardians of culture as Robert Antelme, husband of Marguerite Duras, whose novels Wilfrid recommended. Once a slave in Buchenwald and Gandersheim, Antelme had sadly confessed his joyful relief when executioners overlooked him and selected a comrade.
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