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He took me to a bowling alley where we drank beer while watching the pins fall, and to a saloon where five mechanical pianos hammered out old dusty music one after the other, and to an aquarium where we looked at fish grimacing spitefully. We took streetcars, subways, other streetcars and other subways. I liked riding in the subways. Our foreheads pressed against the window of the first car, we were swallowed up in dizzying tunnels illuminated by pale blue bulbs. Brogan put his arm around me, and our silence was like the silence that unites confident lovers. But in the streets he kept his distance, and it made me sad to feel that we did not speak because we could find nothing to say to each other. Along about mid-afternoon I had to admit to myself that I had made an error in my calculations. In a week, tomorrow, this day would belong to the past and I'd have a chance to get over it. But first I had to live it hour by hour, and during all those hours a stranger was capriciously disposing of my fate. I was so tired and so disappointed that I wanted nothing more than to be alone.
The man and the two women stopped and smiled broadly back at him. A moment later I found myself sitting with them at a table in a dreary cafeteria; they were all speaking very rapidly and I understood nothing of what they were saying. Brogan was laughing a great deal, his face was animated; he seemed relieved to have escaped from our long tete-a-tete. It was only natural: these people were his friends; they had a lot of things to talk about. What, after all, did he and I have in common? The women seated opposite him were young and pretty. Did they please him? I realized that there must certainly have been young, pretty women in his life; but how could I experience so much anguish over that thought when we hadn't even exchanged a single real kiss? And I was suffering. Far off, very far off at the end of a tunnel, I saw one of the emergency exits that had made me feel so secure that morning. But I was much too tired to reach it, even on my knees. 'What a to-do about not getting kissed!' I tried to tell myself. But cynicism didn't help. It was no longer important if I was being more or less ridiculous, worthy of my own approval or deserving of my own blame. I had no control over what was happening; bound hand and foot, I had put myself at the mercy of another. What foolishness! I no longer even knew what I had come looking for here; certainly I must have been out of my mind to imagine that a man who was nothing to me could do something for me. When we were out on the street again, and Brogan had taken my arm, I made up my mind to go right back to the hotel and go to sleep.
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