What Am I Doing Here?

by Bruce Chatwin

  But Paris is not all holiday. Shortly after his arrival, Captain Jünger is ordered to the Bois de Boulogne to supervise the execution of a German deserter, who has been sheltered by a Frenchwoman for nine months. He has trafficked on the black market. He has made his mistress jealous, even beaten her, and she has reported him to the police. At first, Jünger thinks he will feign illness, but then thinks better of it: ‘I have to confess it was the spirit of higher curiosity that induced me to accept.’ He has seen many people die, but never one who knew it in advance. How does it affect one?

  There follows one of the nastiest passages in the literature of war – a firing squad painted in the manner of early Monet: the clearing in the wood, the spring foliage glistening after rain, the trunk of the ash tree riddled with the bullet holes of earlier executions. There are two groups of holes, one for the head and one for the heart, and inside the holes a few black meat flies are sleeping. Then the arrival - two military vehicles, the victim, guards, grave diggers, medical officer and pastor, also a cheap white wood coffin. The face is agreeable, attractive to women; the eyes wide, fixed, avid ‘as if his whole body were suspended from them’; and in his expression something flourishing and childlike. He wears expensive grey trousers and a grey silk shirt. A fly crawls over his left cheek, then sits on his ear. Does he want an eye band? Yes. A crucifix? Yes. The medical officer pins a red card over his heart, the size of a playing card. The soldiers stand in line; the salvo; five small black holes appear on the card like drops of rain; the twitching; the pallor; the guard who wipes the handcuffs with a chiffon handkerchief. And what about the fly that danced in a shaft of sunlight?

  The effectiveness of Jünger’s technique intensifies as the war proceeds. The atmosphere in which he clothes the Military Command reminds one of a Racine tragedy, in which the central characters are either threatened or doomed, and all numbed into elegant paralysis by the howling tyrant offstage. Yet, though the clock ticks on toward catastrophe, they are still allowed to hope for the reprieve of a negotiated peace with the Allies.

  Earlier in 1942, German officers can still raise a toast: 'Us — after the Deluge!’ By the end of the year, it is apparent that the Deluge is also for them. After lunching with Paul Morand at Maxim’s, Jünger sees three Jewish girls arm in arm on the rue Royale with yellow stars pinned to their dresses, and, in a wave of revulsion, feels ashamed to be seen in public. Later, on a mission to the Caucasus in December, he hears a General Müller spell out the details of the gas ovens. All the old codes of honour and decency have broken down, leaving only the foul techniques of German militarism. All the things he has loved – the weapons, the decorations, the uniforms – now, suddenly, fill him with disgust. He feels remorse but not much pity, and dreads the nemesis to come. By the time he gets back to Paris, the Final Solution is in full swing, the trains are running to Auschwitz, and a Commander Ravenstein says, ‘One day my daughter will pay for all this in a brothel for niggers.’

  Letters from home tell of nights of phosphorus and cities in flames. Cologne Cathedral is hit by bombs, and a man from Hamburg reports seeing ‘a woman carrying in each of her arms the corpse of a carbonized infant’. After a terrible raid on Hanover, Jünger asks the art dealer Etienne Bignou to bring up from his safe Douanier Rousseau’s canvas, La Guerre, ou la Chevauchée de la Discorde. ‘This picture is one of the greatest visions of our times . . . [It has] an infantine candour . . . a kind of purity in its terror that reminds me of Emily Brontë.’

  He checks his address book and crosses out the names of the dead and missing. He reads the Book of Job. He visits Braque. He has his copy of Catalogus Coleopterorum rebound, and works on an ‘Appeal to the Youth of Europe’, to be called The Peace. A hermaphrodite butterfly gives him the idea for a treatise on symmetry and, in one brilliant aside, he writes that the genius of Hitler was to realise that the twentieth century is the century of cults - which was why men of rational intelligence were unable to understand or to stop him.

  Meanwhile, with hopes of an Allied invasion, Paris recovers her perennial toughness. The Salon d‘Automne of 1943 is particularly brilliant. ‘Artists’, he observes, ‘continue to create in catastrophe like ants in a half-destroyed anthill.’ Women’s hats have taken on the shape of the Tower of Babel. Frank Jay Gould, an American trapped in France, reads On the Marble Cliffs and says: ‘This guy goes from dreams to reality.’

  Suddenly, in February 1944, Jünger has to dash to Berlin to rescue his son Ernstel who, in a moment of enthusiasm, has blurted out: ‘The Führer should be shot!’ He succeeds in getting Dönitz to reduce the sentence, but from now on he is under suspicion from the Gestapo. Back in Paris, he gets a whiff of the plot to assassinate Hitler and, one evening in May, he dines with Karl-Heinrich von Stölpnagel, the commander-in-chief. The general is tremendously erudite and plunges into a discussion of Byzantine history, of Plato, Plotinus, and the Gnostics. He is ‘Hitler’s biggest enemy’ but he is also tired and tends to repeat himself. ‘In certain circumstances,’ he says, ‘a superior man must be prepared to renounce life.’ They talk into the night. Both men are botanists and they talk of the nightshade family – nicandra, belladonna – the plants of perpetual sleep.

  After the Normandy landings, his friend Speidel – the man who will ‘forget’ the order to V-bomb Paris — tells of his visit to Hitler, now sunk in demented vegetarianism, yelling of ‘new weapons of destruction’. When the July Plot fails, Von Stölpnagel tries to blow his brains out, but blinds himself only, and is strangled in a Berlin prison. Jünger, who had a date to dine with him that evening, comments thus on the futility of the enterprise: ‘It will change little and settle nothing. I have already alluded to this in describing the Prince of Sunmyra in On the Marble Cliffs.’

  Panic at the Hotel Raphäel. The Americans are near, and the salon hostesses gearing for a change. At a last luncheon for her German friends, Florence Jay Gould comes back from the telephone, smiling: ‘La Bourse reprend.’ It’s time for goodbyes. A last Thursday with Marie-Louise Bousquet, who says: ‘Now the Tea-Time boys are coming.’ A last conversation with the Princesse de Sixte-Bourbon. A last bottle of Chambertin 1904 with its art nouveau label. And here is his last entry for Paris:14 August, en route

  Sudden departure at dusk. In the afternoon, last farewells. I left the room in order and put a bouquet on the table. I left pourboires. Unfortunately I left in a drawer some irreplaceable letters.

  The rest of Captain Jünger’s war is not a happy story. Relieved of his functions, he goes home to Kirchhorst where he sorts out his papers, reads tales of shipwrecks, reads Huysmans’s A Rebours, and waits for the rumble of American tanks. When a telegram comes with news of Ernstel’s death on the Italian front, he loses the will to be clever and reveals the stricken horror of a parent who has lost what he loves the most. A photo of Ernstel hangs next to that of his protector, General Speidel, in his library.

  Jünger refused to appear before a ‘de-Nazification’ tribunal on the grounds that he had never been a Nazi. But the whole course of his career put him outside the pale for the post-war German literary establishment. If his ideal was ‘the desert’ then he was condemned, until recently, to stay in it. Since 1950 he has lived in the beautiful, rolling country of Upper Swabia, at Wilflingen, in a house that lies opposite a castle of the Barons von Stauffenberg, where, by coincidence, Pierre Laval was interned after his escape from France in 1944. (Siegmaringen, Marshall Pétain’s residence and the scene of Céline’s D’un Château à l’autre, is only a few miles down the road.)

  My own visit to Jünger five years ago was an odd experience. At eighty, he had snow-white hair but the bounce of a very active schoolboy. He had a light cackling laugh and tended to drift off if he was not the centre of attention. He had recently published a book describing his experiments with drugs, from his first sniff of ether to lysergic acid, and was about to publish an enormous novel called Eumeswil. The ground floor of the house was furnished in the Biedermeier style, with net curtai
ns and white faience stoves, and was inhabited by his second wife, a professional archivist and textual critic of Goethe. Jünger’s own quarters upstairs had the leathery look of a soldier’s bunker, with cabinets for beetles on the landing and a sea of memorabilia - fossils, shells, helmets from both wars, skeletons of animals, and a collection of sandglasses. (In 1954 he wrote A Treatise on the Sandglass — a philosophical meditation on the passage of time.)

  If I had hoped for more memories of Paris under the Occupation, I was disappointed. In answer to questions, he simply recited an excerpt from the diary, though occasionally he would rush to the filing cabinet and come back with some pièce justificative. One of these was a letter from his friend Henri de Montherlant, quoting a remark of Tolstoy: ‘There is no point in visiting a great writer because he is incarnate in his works.’ Since I had an interest in Montherlant, I was able to draw Jünger out a little further, and he returned again from the filing cabinet, this time flourishing a rather blotchy sheet of Xerox paper on which was written:Le suicide fait partie du capitale

  de l’humanité,

  Ernst Jünger

  8 juin 1972.

  This aphorism of Jünger’s dates from the Thirties, and the story goes that Alfred Rosenberg once said: ‘It’s a pity Herr Jünger doesn’t make use of his capital.’ But the scene you have to imagine is this:

  Montherlant, dying of cancer, is sitting in his apartment on the Quai Voltaire, surrounded by his collection of Greek and Roman marbles. On his desk are a bottle of champagne, a revolver, a pen, and a sheet of paper. He writes: ‘Le suicide fait partie . . . ’

  Bang!

  The blotches were photocopies of blood.

  1981

  ON THE ROAD WITH MRS G.

  Mrs Gandhi’s secretary - her Assistant Private Secretary called to say that she would be driving at four-thirty in the morning to Pantnagar Agricultural University where the riot police had shot some peasants. Estimates of the numbers dead varied from thirteen to four hundred.

  ‘If you want to see Madame in action,’ he said, ‘don’t throw up the chance.’

  We left Delhi in the half-light: Mrs Gandhi’s air – conditioned Chevrolet leading a procession of five cars. Our driver had been to the Doon School with Sanjay Gandhi, and his nickname was Dumpy. His companion was a tall, dark, graceful girl who had been a model in New York and wore a painted Rajasthani sari.

  ‘Isn’t Mrs G. rather marvellous?’ she said.

  Later, when the hired claque whizzed by in a minibus, she said: ‘Do look! There go the rowdies!’

  At Rundrapur, Congress-Indira workers had put together a fair-sized, if rather taciturn crowd. But once the Rowdies started bawling ‘Indira Gandhi Zindabad!’ people came running from all directions and jammed the yard outside the Guest House. The police had to bash a way for her to pass upstairs. A man shouted in my ear: ‘Everyone is waiting for Indiraji. The people have love for her.’

  Mrs Gandhi wore a green-and-white striped sari, and sat down to a breakfast that never came. I introduced myself.

  ‘Oh! that’s who you are!’ she said. ‘I can only give you my little finger to shake because there’s something the matter with the others.’

  She offered round a piece of soap in case anyone wanted to wash. From time to time, she stepped out onto the balcony and glowered at the outstretched palms and betel-stained mouths of the crowd.

  Notwithstanding the imperial nose and the great brooding eyes, she seemed small, frail and nervous. She had a tic in her left cheek, and kept rolling her tongue round the right side of her mouth. My immediate impulse was to protect her.

  She went into the bedroom, and a hysterical young man in glasses tried to barge past her Sikh bodyguards.

  ‘Let me see her!’ he shrieked. ‘You’re the ones who ruined her reputation during the Emergency.’

  The town of Pantnagar lies on a fertile plain of sugar plantations and maize-fields. Along the horizon, the foothills of the Himalayas flickered in the heat haze.

  The local farmers are Jats. They are a caste of peasant proprietors who have resisted every attempt to make them share their land with the landless. They employ a shifting workforce of Purbias: a poor, landless caste from the eastern half of the state. About 6,000 Purbias are employed on the Agricultural University’s farms: only Purbias died in the shooting.

  News of the atrocity had filled the Delhi newspapers for five days: the date fell on the fifty-ninth anniversary of the Amritsar Massacre. Worse, the men involved in the shooting were Jats. Jats had control of the University and were running it as a private fief. The Vice-Chancellor, a Mr D.P. Singh, was a Jat, and he was the nominee of Mrs Gandhi’s arch-enemy, the Home Minister of the ruling Janata Government, Charan Singh.

  Charan Singh left Mrs Gandhi’s cabinet in 1977 with the comment, ‘She never speaks the truth, even by mistake!’ He is an obdurate seventy-six-year-old, an agricultural economist and a Gandhian. He abhors the city and heavy industry: India is to be saved by its independent peasant farmers. At his prompting, the Janata is channelling investment away from the industrial to the rural sector. The reaction of big business has been to pump money into Mrs Gandhi’s campaign.

  Charan Singh also heads the movement for her arrest and trial – although he bungled it last October. The police officer turned up with the wrong kind of warrant. (She had fixed this through spies inside the Ministry.) So, by the time he returned with the right warrant, she had phoned the entire press corps and was staging a monumental scene in the front garden.

  ‘Handcuff me!’ she screamed. ’If I’m a common criminal, I demand to be handcuffed.’

  In the kitchen, the cook – whom I managed to interview – was shredding documents with an Italian noodle-cutter belonging to Rajiv Gandhi’s wife, Sonia.

  Owing to a heart-condition, Charan Singh did not show up at Pantnagar in the summer heat. Nor did any member of the Janata Government. But Mrs G. was not going to let the opportunity slip.

  At noon, the cars halted by a grain-mill where, half an hour after the main shooting, a police platoon had gunned down five workers as they were having lunch. Dr Pant, a serene, bearded academic, showed us round.

  ‘Pure barbarity!’ he muttered. ‘How could any civilised government permit such a thing?’

  Mrs G. took little notice but strode round the exhibits with a grim face. She peered at a pool of caked blood on the grass. She peered at a lamp post buckled by bullets, and at a bullethole through a boy’s shoulder. Then she met the widows. She gave them no consolation. Instead, she offered her jagged three-quarter profile to them and the photographers. The widows seemed quite pleased.

  At the University campus an excitable crowd was waiting. Mrs G. mounted a canopied podium, and the speeches began. Members of the Provincial Armed Constabulary — the PACs – strutted about in perfectly pressed khaki. In one of the buildings some students had begun a ‘fast till death’ – which they called off the moment she left.

  My friend of the afternoon was Sanjay’s wife, Menaka – a pretty, freckle-faced girl dressed in scarlet kurta-pyjamas. She had not had an easy time. Her father, Lt Col Anand, was thought to have siphoned funds away from Sanjay’s Maruti car factory and diverted them to Congress-I. Last June he was found shot dead in a field, lying on newspapers full of the scandal. A note at his side read ‘Sanjay worry unbearable’. Neither dogs nor vultures had touched the corpse for two days. The gun was missing. The arms were rigid. It was an odd kind of suicide.

  ‘Come on, Brucie.’ Menaka took my hand. ‘Come and watch me do my fishwife act!’

  She led me to the Children’s Park where the PACs had pitched camp.

  ‘Show me your rifles,’ she screeched at a kind-faced sergeant.

  ‘I can’t, Menakaji.’

  ‘You showed them when you murdered people. Why can’t you show them to me?’

  She raised her camera.

  ‘Please, Menakaji, don’t photograph me. I have a wife and a mother. We had nothing to do with the k
illing. It was the 10th Battalion from Meerut.

  The 10th Battalion had been transferred.

  The speeches ended and Mrs Gandhi went to inspect the scene of the crime: at a crossroads between the student hostel and some staff bungalows.

  The trouble began when some non-Jats among the students and staff encouraged the Purbias to strike for higher pay. A local Congress-I politician got in on the act. The Vice-Chancellor panicked and asked for a detachment of police. About a thousand Purbias first prayed in their temple and then set off in a protest march towards the administrative building. The PACs blocked their path – and they sat down.

  The students, confined to their hostel, had a grandstand view from the roof. They saw the police officer fire a single shot into the air, and saw his men fire straight into the crowd. Some of the strikers ran for an open drain where we saw their sandals still floating on the surface. Others rushed for the bungalows but were dragged out and bayoneted. There was a list of 81 dead: 160 were missing.

  Yet the cheerful crowds milling around Mrs G. gave the event the air of a race-meeting. A senior student boasted it was he who had persuaded her to come. He knew all along that the Jats had planned the massacre for that morning.

  ‘In which case,’ I said, ‘why didn’t you stop the Purbias from marching to their deaths?’

  He shrugged and walked away.

  A Janata supporter said the whole thing had been set up by agents-provocateurs.

  ‘And now let me show you something absolutely gruesome,’ said a bright-eyed boy from Kerala. He pointed to a bed of zinnias and petunias, in which there was a reddish smear, buzzing with flies.