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Suddenly, he was no longer either awkward or modest. His desire transformed me. I who for so long a time had been without taste, without form, again possessed breasts, a belly, flesh; I was as nourishing as bread, as fragrant as earth. It was so miraculous that I didn't think of measuring my time or my pleasure; I know only that before we fell asleep I could hear the gentle chirping of dawn.
I felt a need for distractions; those too-intense hours had tired me. In the streetcar, I dozed on Lewis's shoulder. I didn't try to figure out where I was in that city; it didn't seem to me as if it had fixed arteries and precise means of transportation like the others. It was necessary to conform to certain rituals that Lewis knew, and then places would surge up from nowhere. The Delisa Club surged up from nowhere, crowned with a mauve halo. There was a full-length mirror just inside the door and together we smiled at our reflections. The top of my head was on a level with his shoulder; we looked young and happy and I said gaily, 'What a handsome couple!' And then I felt a wrench in my heart. No, we weren't a couple, we'd never be a couple. We could have loved each other, I was sure of that. But at what point in time, at what place in the world? Nowhere on earth, in any case, and at no point in the future. 'We'd like to have dinner,' Lewis said. A- very dark-complexioned maitre d’hôtel, who looked like a heavyweight boxer, led us to a booth near the stage. Baskets filled with fried chicken were set before us. The musicians hadn't arrived yet, but the place was full - a few whites and many negroes, some of whom were wearing fezzes on their heads. 'Why are they wearing fezzes?'
I knew. I turned my head away; I could retreat no further. 'Lewis,' I murmured, 'I haven't told you enough about myself. There are things I've got to explain to you ...'
'Yes?' There was an apprehensive look in his eyes, and I thought, 'It's all over!' One last time, I looked at the stove, the walls, the window, at that room in which I would soon be nothing but an intruder. And then, blindly, the words tumbling over one another, I began spouting sentences. In the mountains one day, I fell headlong down a ravine. I thought I was going to die and I felt nothing but indifference. Once more I recognized that feeling of resignation. Only I wished I could close my eyes!
'I didn't realize your marriage still meant so much to you,' Lewis said.
'It does.' He remained silent for a long moment.
'Do you understand me?' I murmured.
</3
I spent the following day shopping. I remembered Paris with its sad shop windows, its frowsy women, and I bought things left and right for everyone I could think of. We dined out, and when I climbed the wooden stairway holding on to Lewis's arm I thought, 'It's the last time!' The rubies of the gas tank were glowing for the last time between the earth and the sky. I went into the room. One would have thought a cut-throat had just murdered a woman and ransacked her closets. My two suitcases were open, and scattered over the bed, the chairs, the floor, were nylon lingerie, stockings, cosmetics, dress material, shoes, scarves. There was a smell of love, of death, of disaster. In truth, it was a funeral home, and all those objects were relics of a dead woman, the sacraments she would carry with her to the here-after. I stood rooted to the spot. Lewis went over to the dresser, opened a drawer, and took out a mauve carton. He looked embarrassed as he held it out to me.
But then, why wasn't I able to remain in peace in it? Why those tears? It was a very lovely springtime, I was in good health, I lacked nothing. And yet while walking in the woods, I would stop from time to time and feel like crying, as if I had lost everything. Softly, I would call out, 'Lewis!' What a silence! From dusk to dawn, from dawn to night, I had had his breath, his voice, his smile. And now: not a sign of them. Did he still exist? I listened: not a murmur. Hooked: not a trace. I no longer understood myself. 'I'm crying,' I thought, 'and yet I'm here. Don't I love Lewis enough? I'm here, and yet I'm crying. Don't I love Robert enough?' I admire people who can contain life in definite formulas. 'Physical love is nothing,' they say. Or, 'A love which isn't physical is nothing.' But I was no less attached to Robert for having met Lewis; and Robert's presence, all-embracing as it was, couldn't make up for Lewis's absence.
'You say that if I remain silent about the camps I'd be an accomplice,' he said. 'But in speaking out, I'd become an accomplice of the enemies of the Soviet Union, that is, of all those who want to keep the world as it is. It's true that those camps are a horrible thing. But you mustn't forget that horror is everywhere.'
Suddenly, he began speaking volubly. He isn't the type for great historical frescoes, vast social panoramas and yet, that afternoon, as the words tumbled from his mouth, all the wretchedness of the world fell over that sun-drenched countryside: weariness, poverty, the despair of the French proletariat, the misery of Spain and Italy, the enslavement of the colonial peoples, the famines and plagues of China and India. All around us, men were dying by the millions without ever having lived; their agony blackened the sky, and I wondered how we still dared to breathe.
'So you see,' Robert said, 'my duties as an intellectual, my respect for the truth - that's all just so much idle chatter! The only question is to know whether, in denouncing the camps, you're working for mankind or against it.'
'All right,' I said. 'But what reason have you for thinking that the Russian cause is today still identified with the cause of humanity? It seems to me that the existence of the camps makes it necessary to review the whole Soviet question.'
'There are so many things that we should know!' Robert said. 'Is it really a question of an institution that is indispensable to the regime? Or does it relate to certain policies that are subject to modification? Can we hope that they'll be quickly liquidated once Russia begins rebuilding? Before making any decisions, I want to know all these things.'
ahhhh
The next morning, Robert took the ten o'clock bus. Sitting in the garden, I watched for the mailman: no letter from Lewis. He had warned me it would be a week before he wrote, and letters from Chicago didn't come quickly. Certainly, he hadn't forgotten me, but he was infinitely distant. It was useless seeking help in that direction. Help against what? I went into the study and put a record on the gramophone. Something unbearable was happening to me: I was beginning to have doubts about Robert. 'There was a time when he would have spoken out,' I said to myself. There was a time when he was completely forthright, would let neither Russia nor the Communist Party get away with anything. And one of the raisons d'etre of the SRL was to allow him to voice constructive criticism. Sullenly, he chose to remain silent. Why? Accusing him of being an idealist had wounded him deeply; he was trying to be a realist, to adapt himself to the hard necessities of these times. But it's only too easy to adapt oneself. I, too, adapt myself, and I'm not proud of it. Always pretending not to notice, always accepting — in the end, it adds up to betraying. I accept absence and I betray my love; I accept surviving the dead and I forget them, betray them. But at any rate, as long as it concerns only the dead and myself, there are no major victims. But betraying the living, that's serious!
'If I spoke out, I'd betray others,' Robert would answer me. And in chorus, they would add, 'You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.' But in the end, who's going to eat all those omelettes? The broken eggs will rot and fester in the earth. 'It's already festering.' Yes, that's true. Too many things are true; they make my head spin, all those truths fighting each other. I wonder how they keep from getting all mixed up. As for me, I don't know how to add four hundred million Chinese and fifteen million slave labourers. And besides, maybe what you have to do is subtract. In any case, all those calculations are false. One man plus one woman doesn't make two men; it will forever make one plus one. All right, I'm wrong in resorting to arithmetic; to make order out of chaos, you have to turn to dialectics. It's a matter of getting beyond the slave labourers to the Chinese people. Good. Let's get beyond. Everything passes; 'all is vanity and vexation of spirit'; we'll be past all this some day. We'll have got beyond the camps, and we'll have got beyond my own existence. It's laughable, this little ephemeral life brooding over those camps which the future had already abolished! History takes care of itself and each one of us into the bargain. Let's just keep quiet, then, each in his own little hole.
Well, then, why don't they keep quiet? That's the question I asked Robert more than twenty years ago, when I was a student. He laughed at me, but I'm not sure today that he ever completely convinced me. They pretended to believe that humanity is a single, immortal person, that one day it will be rewarded for all its sacrifices, and that I, myself, will receive my due. But I don't accept that: death nibbles at everything. The sacrificed generations won't rise from their graves to take part in the final love feasts; what might console them is that the chosen ones will join them under the earth at the end of a very brief interval spent above it. Between happiness and unhappiness, there isn't perhaps as much difference as one might think.
ohgod
[...] The letter was typewritten, cheerful, pleasant, and empty, and for a long moment I stared in stupefaction at the signature which sealed it closed as implacably as a tombstone. I could have re-read that page a hundred times, could have twisted and turned it every way, and still I would not have been able to squeeze out a single new word, a single smile, a single kiss. And it would not help much to begin waiting again: at the end of my waiting, I would meet only another sheet of paper. Lewis had stayed in Chicago, he continued to live, he lived without me. I walked over to the window, looked at the summer sky, at the happy trees, and I realized that I was only beginning to suffer. The same silence: only there was no longer any hope in it; there would always be that same silence. When our bodies were no longer touching, when our eyes no longer looked at each other, what did we have in common? Our pasts had nothing in common, our futures receded from each other, we did not hear the same language spoken around us, and even the clocks laughed at us. Here the morning was gleaming brightly, and it was night in that room in Chicago. We couldn't even meet in the sky. No, there was no path between us — except those sobs in my throat, those sobs I repressed.
'Don't be afraid of them,' I said. 'You'll always be the most beautiful.'
'Oh, not any more,' she said. 'No, not any more!" She was looking at herself with an unfriendly eye, and suddenly, for the first time in a good many years, I, too, saw her with the eyes of a stranger. She looked tired, her cheeks had taken on a purplish tinge, and her chin was starting to sag; the two deep gashes at the sides of her mouth pointed up the strength of her features. There was a time when Paula's creamy skin, her velvety look, the black shock of her hair softened her beauty. Deprived of that banal charm, her face became strange; it was shaped too definitely to excuse the indecision of a curve, the faltering of a colour. Instead of artfully engraving itself, time had brutally marked that noble, baroque mask which still well deserved admiration, but which would have been more in place in a museum than a salon.