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Yes, Louis was the only one who shared with him those memories of his childhood and his youth, memories which had finally blossomed that night. Suddenly, Henri felt revolted by them. He had no luck with his past. It often seemed to him that all the years gone by remained at his call, intact, like a book you've just closed and which you can reopen at will. He had promised himself that before his life was over he would sum it up. But for one reason or another, his attempts always miscarried. At any rate, it was hardly the moment to try piecing his whole existence together; there were too many hands to shake; and under the assault of ambiguous compliments, he was losing his footing.
He walked rapidly to the door; he was happy to leave and didn't try to hide it. And it was apparent, too, that Anne was staying only out of politeness; she felt ill at ease; What exactly had Lucie said? 'That's why Lachaume and Vincent didn't come to the party,' Henri thought. 'They're all blaming me for association with these people.' He stole a glance at Paula, who was frozen into a reproachful statue, and while continuing to greet the elegant guests whom Vernon was introducing to him he wondered, 'Is it I who's at fault? Or have things changed?' There was a time when you knew your friends and your enemies, when you liked people at the peril of your life or hated them unto death. Now, however, reservations and grudges found their way into every friendship; hate had been dissipated. No one was willing any more to give his life or to kill.
'You write it!' Henri said irritably. He smiled at Josette, who was displaying her golden-brown shoulders to a circle of admirers. He started to walk towards her when he caught Marie-Ange's trapped look; Louis had pinned her against the buffet and was speaking to her nose to nose while drinking a martini. Men usually reacted to Louis' intellectual seduction, but he had never been successful with women. There was a greedy eagerness in the smile he offered Marie-Ange; you felt as if he were ready to withdraw it the moment it had achieved its purpose. He seemed to be saying, 'I want you; but hurry up and give in, because I have no time to waste.' A few steps from them, Lambert stood, gloomily pensive. Henri stopped beside him.
oof
Henri listened to the sound of his step fading away in the hall. He felt as if it were his own youth that had just appealed to him; he wouldn't have considered remaining silent for one second if he had seen, through the eyes of a young man of twenty, those millions of slaves imprisoned behind barbed wire. And Lambert had seen through him; he was hesitating. Why? He didn't want the Communists to see him as an enemy, and, more important, he would have liked to hide from himself the fact that in Russia, too, something was rotten. But all that was. nothing but cowardice. He got up and walked down the stairs. 'A Communist would have the right to choose silence,' he thought. 'His positions have been stated, and even when he lies, he's not, in a way, deceiving anyone. But I, who profess to independence, if I use my credit to stifle the truth, I'm a swindler. I'm not a Communist precisely because I want to be free to say what the Communists don't want to say and can't say. It's often a thankless role, but one whose usefulness they themselves fundamentally recognize. Certainly Lachaume, for example, would be grateful to me for speaking out — he and all those who want to see the camps abolished, but who aren't permitted to protest openly against them. And who knows? Perhaps they'll attempt something officially; perhaps pressures applied by the various Communist parties themselves will make the Soviet Union modify its penitentiary system. Oppressing men in secret and oppressing them in front of the whole world isn't the same thing. To keep my mouth shut would be defeatism; it would be both refusing to look things in the face and denying that they can be changed; it would be condemning the Soviet Union irrevocably under the guise of not judging her. If there's really no chance for her to become what she should be, then there's no longer any hope left on earth; what we do, what we say, no longer has any meaning. Yes,' Henri repeated to himself, climbing the stairway to Dubreuilh's apartment, 'either speaking out means something, or nothing means anything. We've got to speak out. And unless Dubreuilh has actually joined the Party, he must agree.' Henri rang the bell. 'But if Dubreuilh has joined, would he tell me?'
Dubreuilh interrupted Henri. 'I know perfectly well what we'd say. My conviction is that these camps aren't essential to the regime, as Peltov maintains. They're tied in with certain policies which can be deplored without questioning the whole regime. We'd dissociate the two things: we'd condemn corrective labour, but we'd defend the Soviet Union.'
'All right,' Henri said. 'But it's as plain as day that our words would carry much more weight if we were the first to denounce the camps. Then no one could believe we were following a line. We'd get the credit and we'd be cutting the ground right out from under the anti-Communists' feet. They're the ones who would look like partisans when they started following suit.'
'Oh, that wouldn't change anything; people would believe them anyhow,' Dubreuilh said. 'And our intervention would give them a strong arguing point: even the sympathizers were so shocked that they turned against the Soviet Union. That's what they'd say! And that would upset people who otherwise wouldn't have believed a word of it.'
ahhhhh
The article appeared the next morning. Lambert declared himself very dissatisfied with it, and Henri had a feeling that it was being vigorously argued about in the editorial room. That evening, a messenger brought Dubreuilh's letter,. The Committee of the SRL had expelled Perron and Samazelle; the movement no longer had any connection with L'Espoir. It deplored the exploitation, to the profit of anti-Communist propaganda, of facts which could be judged only within the total framework of the Stalinist regime. Whatever their exact import, the CP was today the only hope of the French proletariat, and if one sought to discredit it, it was because one chose to serve the cause of reaction. Henri immediately wrote an answer. He accused the SRL of yielding to Communist terrorism and of betraying its original programme.
alas
‘Above all, don't apologize!' She looked up at him, her face trembling with humility. 'The night of the opening and in the days that followed, I came to understand a great many things. There's no standard by which you can be measured against other people, against me. To want you as I had dreamed of you and not as you are was to prefer myself to you. It was pure presumptuousness. But that's over. There's only you; I'm nothing. I accept being nothing, and I'll accept anything from you.'
'Listen, stop getting excited,' he said, embarrassed. 'I said we'd talk about it tomorrow.'
'You don't believe I'm sincere?' Paula said. 'It's my fault; I had too much pride. The road of self-abnegation isn't easy, you know. But I swear to you now: I'll ask nothing more for myself. You alone exist, and you can demand anything of me.'
'My God!' Henri thought. 'If only she'll leave before Lenoir gets here!' Aloud, he said, 'I believe you. But all I ask of you for the moment is to be patient until tomorrow and let me get back to my work.'
ahhh to put someone on a pedestal [even if they somewhat deserve it], whomst among us etc
'But not necessarily these,' Henri said. 'And you aren't going to compare the lot of an unemployed man with that of a forced labourer.'
'At least their daily needs are assured. I'm convinced their lot is less awful than anti-Comunist propaganda would have it. And we tend to forget that a Soviet man's way of thinking is different from ours; he finds it natural, for example, to be relocated according to the needs of production.'
'Whatever his way of thinking, no man finds it natural to be exploited, undernourished, deprived of all his rights, imprisoned, brutalized by work, condemned to die of cold, scurvy, or exhaustion,' Henri said. He thought, 'Politics are really incredible!' Lenoir literally couldn't have stood seeing a fly suffer, and yet he gladly accepted the horrors of the camps.
'No one wants evil for the sake of evil,' Lenoir said. 'And the Soviet Union less than any other government. If they take those measures, it's because they're necessary.' Lenoir became even redder. 'How dare you condemn the institutions of a country whose needs, whose difficulties, you know nothing about. It's an intolerable presumption.'
Definitely, people don't enjoy asking themselves questions. One way or another, they all manage to defend their systems. The Communist journals went as far as to sing the praises of an institution they baptized 'Rehabilitation and Corrective Labour Camps'. And all the anti-Stalinists saw in that affair was a pretext to rekindle well-established indignations.
'I can't understand this prejudice against America,' Bennet said in a melancholy voice. 'You've got to be a Communist to see in her only the citadel of capitalism. For it's also a country of workers, the country of progress, of prosperity, of the future.'
'It's the country that everywhere and always systematically takes the side of the privileged. In China, in Greece, in Turkey, in Korea, what are they defending? It isn't the people, is it? It's capital, it's the big land holdings. When I think that they're supporting Franco and Salazar...'
Henri had learned that very morning that his old Portuguese friends had finally fomented a rebellion. It ended up with nine hundred arrests.
'You're speaking of the policies of the State Department,' Bennet said. 'You forget there's also an American people. I assure you that you can put your trust in the leftist trade unions and that whole segment of the nation which sincerely believes in liberty and democracy.'
'The unions have never opposed the government's policy,' Henri said.