‘You know very well I couldn’t.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said happily. ‘Even if you said you could, I wouldn’t believe you.’
She walked towards the bathroom. It was impossible not to weaken from time to time and speak a few kind words to her, smile gently at her. She stored those treasured relics in her heart and extracted miracles from them whenever she felt her faith wavering. ‘But in spite of everything, she knows I don’t love her any more,’ he said to himself for reassurance. He undressed and put on his pyjamas. She knew it, yes. But as long as she didn’t admit it to herself it meant nothing. He heard a rustle of silk, then the sound of running water and the clinking of glass, those sounds which once used to make his heart pound. ‘No, not tonight, not tonight,’ he said to himself uneasily. Paula appeared in the doorway, grave and nude, her hair tumbling over her shoulders. She was nearly as perfect as ever, but for Henri all her splendid beauty no longer meant anything. She slipped in between the sheets and without uttering a word, pressed her body to his. Paula withdrew her lips slightly, and, embarrassed, he heard her murmuring old endearments he never spoke to her now.
‘Am I still your beautiful wisteria vine?’
‘Now and always.’
‘And do you love me? Do you really still love me?’
He did not have the courage at that moment to provoke a scene, he was resigned to avow anything – and Paula knew it. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Do you belong to me?’
‘To you alone.’
‘Tell me you love me, say it.’
‘I love you.’
She uttered a long moan of satisfaction. He embraced her violently, smothered her mouth with his lips, and to get it over with as quickly as possible immediately penetrated her.
When finally he fell limp on Paula, he heard a triumphant moan.
‘Are you happy?’ she murmured.
‘Of course.’
‘I’m so terribly happy!’ Paula exclaimed, looking at him through shining tear-brimmed eyes. He hid her unbearably bright face against his shoulder. ‘The almond trees will be in bloom …’ he said to himself, closing his eyes. ‘And there’ll be oranges hanging from the orange trees.’
II
No, I shan’t meet death today. Not today or any other day. I’ll be dead for others and yet I’ll never have known death.
I closed my eyes again, but I couldn’t sleep. Why had death entered my dreams once more? It is prowling inside me; I can feel it prowling there. Why?
I hadn’t always been aware that one day I would die. As a child, I believed in God. A white robe and two shimmering wings were awaiting me in heaven’s vestry and I wanted so much to break through the clouds and try them on. I would often lie down on my quilt, my hands clasped, and abandon myself to the delights of the hereafter. Sometimes in my sleep I would say to myself, ‘I’m dead,’ and the voice watching over me guaranteed me eternity. I was horrified when I first discovered the silence of death. A mermaid had died on a deserted beach. She had renounced her immortal soul for the love of a young man and all that remained of her was a bit of white foam without memory and without voice. ‘It’s only a fairy tale,’ I would say to myself for reassurance.
But it wasn’t a fairy tale. I was the mermaid. God became an abstract idea in the depths of the sky, and one evening I blotted it out altogether. I’ve never felt sorry about losing God, for He had robbed me of the earth. But one day I came to realize that in renouncing Him I had condemned myself to death. I was fifteen, and I cried out in fear in the empty house. When I regained my senses, I asked myself, ‘What do other people do? What will I do? Will I always live with this fear inside me?’
From the moment I fell in love with Robert, I never again felt fear, of anything. I had only to speak his name and I would feel safe and secure: he’s working in the next room … I can get up and open the door … But I remain in bed; I’m not sure any more that he too doesn’t hear that little, gnawing sound. The earth splits open under our feet, and above our heads there is an infinite abyss. I no longer know who we are, nor what awaits us.
Suddenly, I sat bolt upright, opened my eyes. How could I possibly admit to myself that Robert was in danger? How could I ever bear it? He hadn’t told me anything really disturbing, nothing really new. I’m tired, I drank too much; just a little four-o’clock-in-the-morning frenzy. But who’s to decide at what hour one sees things clearest? Wasn’t it precisely when I believed myself most secure that I used to awaken in frenzies? And did I ever really believe it?
I can’t quite remember. We didn’t pay very much attention to ourselves, Robert and I. Only events counted: the flight from Paris, the return, the sirens, the bombs, the standing in lines, our reunions, the first issues of L’Espoir. A brown candle was sputtering in Paula’s apartment. With a couple of tin cans, we had built a stove in which we used to burn scraps of paper. The smoke would sting our eyes. Outside, puddles of blood, the whistling of bullets, the rumbling of artillery and tanks. In all of us, the same silence, the same hunger, the same hope. Every morning we would awaken asking ourselves the same question: Is the swastika still flying above the Senate? And in August, when we danced around blazing bonfires in the streets of Montparnasse, the same joy was in all our hearts. Then the autumn slipped by, and only a few hours ago, while we were completing the task of forgetting our dead by the lights of a Christmas tree, I realized that we were beginning to exist again each for himself. ‘Do you think it’s possible to bring back the past?’ Paula had asked. And Henri had said, ‘I feel like writing a light novel.’ They could once again speak in their normal voices, have their books published; they could argue again, organize political groups, make plans. That’s why they were all so happy. Well, almost all. Anyhow, this isn’t the time for me to be tormenting myself. Tonight’s a holiday, the first Christmas of peace, the last Christmas at Buchenwald, the last Christmas on earth, the first Christmas Diego hasn’t lived through. We were dancing, we were kissing each other around the tree sparkling with promises, and there were many, oh, so many, who weren’t there. No one had heard their last words; they were buried nowhere, swallowed up in emptiness. Two days after the liberation, Geneviève had placed her hand on a coffin. Was it the right one? Jacques’s body had never been found; a friend claimed he had buried his notebooks under a tree. What notebooks? Which tree? Sonia had asked for a sweater and silk stockings, and then she never again asked for anything. Where were Rachel’s bones and the lovely Rosa’s? In the arms that had so often clasped Rosa’s soft body, Lambert was now holding Nadine and Nadine was laughing the way she used to laugh when Diego held her in his arms. I looked down the row of Christmas trees reflected in the large mirrors and I thought, ‘There are the candles and the holly and the mistletoe they’ll never see. Everything that’s been given me, I stole from them,’ They were killed. Which one first? He or his father? Death didn’t enter into his plans. Did he know he was going to die? Did he rebel at the end or was he resigned to it? How will I ever know? And now that he’s dead, what difference does it make?
No, tombstone, no date of death. That’s why I’ve been groping for him through that life he loved so tumultuously. I hold out my hand towards the light switch and hesitantly withdraw it. In my desk is a picture of Diego, but even though I looked at it for hours I would never find again under that head of bushy hair, his real face of flesh and bones, that face in which everything was too large – his eyes, nose, ears, mouth. He was sitting in the study and Robert had asked, ‘What will you do if the Nazis win?’ And he had answered, ‘A Nazi victory doesn’t enter into my plans.’ His plans consisted of marrying Nadine and becoming a great poet. And he might have made it, too. At sixteen he already knew how to turn words into hot, glowing embers. He might have needed only a very little time – five years, four years; he lived his life so fast. Huddled with the others around the electric heater, I used