The Mandarins

‘Why don’t you write?’ Scriassine asked.

‘There are enough books in the world.’

‘That’s not the only reason,’ he said, staring at me through small, prying eyes. ‘The truth is you don’t want to expose yourself.’

‘Expose myself to what?’

‘On the surface, you seem very sure of yourself, but basically you’re extremely timid. You’re one of those people who pride themselves on not doing things.’

I interrupted him. ‘Don’t try analysing me; I know every dark recess of myself. I’m a psychiatrist, you know.’

‘I know,’ he said smiling. ‘Do you think we could have dinner together one evening? I feel lost in this blacked out Paris; I don’t seem to know anyone any more.’

Suddenly, I thought, ‘Well, well! At least for him I have legs!’ I took out my note-book; I had no reason for refusing.

‘All right, let’s have dinner together,’ I said. ‘Can you make it the third of January?’

‘It’s a date. Eight o’clock at the Ritz bar. Does that suit you?’

‘Fine.’

I felt ill at ease. Oh, it isn’t that I cared much what he thought of me. No, not that. When I see my own likeness in the depths of someone else’s consciousness, I always experience a moment of panic. But it doesn’t last very long; I snap right out of it. What did bother me was having glimpsed Robert through eyes that weren’t mine. Had he really reached an impasse? I looked over at him and saw him take Paula by the waist and spin her around; with his other hand, he was drawing God only knows what in the air. Perhaps he was explaining something about the flow of time to her. In any case, they were both laughing; he didn’t give the least impression of being in danger. Were he in danger, he would surely have known it; Robert isn’t often mistaken and he never lies to himself. I went to the bay window and hid myself behind the red draperies. Scriassine had spoken quite a bit of nonsense, but he had posed certain questions I was unable to brush off so easily. During all these weeks, I had fled from questions. We’d been waiting so long for this moment – the liberation, victory – that I wanted to get all I could out of it. There would always be time enough tomorrow to think of the next day. Well, now I had thought of it, and I wondered what Robert thought. His doubts never produced a diminishing of activity, but on the contrary they stimulated him to excesses. Didn’t those long-drawn-out conversations, those letters, those telephone calls, those nocturnal debauches of work cover up a deep disturbance? He never hides anything from me, but sometimes he keeps certain worries temporarily to himself. And besides, I thought remorsefully, tonight he again repeated to Paula, ‘We’re at the crossroads.’ He said it often, and through cowardice I avoided giving those words their true weight. The crossroads. Therefore, in Robert’s eyes, the world was in danger. And he is the world for me. He was in danger! He spoke volubly as we were returning home, arm in arm, through the familiar darkness along the quays. But tonight his voice wasn’t enough to reassure me. He was bursting with what he had seen and heard, and he was very gay; when he has remained shut in for days and nights on end, the least occasion to go out becomes an event. When he spoke of the party, it seemed to me as if I had spent the evening with my eyes blindfolded and my ears stuffed with cotton. He had eyes all around his head and a dozen pairs of ears. I listened to him, but at the same time I continued questioning myself. He was never going to complete that journal he had kept so conscientiously all during the war. Why not? Was that a symptom? Of what?

‘Poor, unhappy Paula! It’s a catastrophe for a woman to be loved by a writer,’ Robert was saying. ‘She believed everything Perron told her about herself.’

I tried to concentrate on Paula. ‘I’m afraid the liberation went to her head,’ I said. ‘Last year, she had practically wiped out all her illusions. And now she’s beginning to play at being madly in love again. But she’s only playing.’

‘She wanted absolutely to make me say that time doesn’t exist,’ Robert said. ‘The best part of her life is behind her, and now that the war’s over she’s hoping to relive the past.’

‘Isn’t that what we were all hoping for?’ I asked. I thought I had spoken the words lightly, but Robert’s hand tightened around my arm.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘Not a thing; everything’s perfect,’ I said flippantly.

‘Come now! I know what it means when you start speaking in your worldly woman’s voice,’ Robert said. ‘I’m sure something’s churning in that little head of yours. How many glasses of punch did you have?’

‘Certainly less than you. And anyhow, the punch has nothing to do with it.’

‘Ah! You admit it!’ Robert said triumphantly. ‘Something is the matter and the punch has nothing to do with it. What is it then?’

‘Scriassine,’ I answered, laughing. ‘He explained to me why French intellectuals are done for.’

‘He’d like that!’

‘I know, but he frightened me anyhow.’

‘A great big girl like you who lets herself be frightened by the first prophet who comes along! I get a big kick out of Scriassine; he’s restless, he rambles on, boils up, makes you know he’s there. But you shouldn’t take him seriously.’

‘He said that politics will eat you up, that you’ll stop writing.’

‘And you believed him?’ Robert said gaily.

‘Well, it is true you’re not showing any sign of finishing your memoirs,’ I replied.

Robert paused for a second and then said, ‘That’s a special case.’

‘But why?’

‘There are too many weapons in those memoirs that can be used against me.’

‘That’s precisely why the thing is worth what it’s worth,’ I said spiritedly. ‘It’s so rare to find a man who dares to come out in the open! And when he does accept the dare, he invariably wins in the end.’

‘Yes,’ Robert said, ‘after he’s dead.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Now that I’m back in politics I have a lot of enemies. Do you realize how delighted they’d be the day those memoirs appeared in print?’

‘Your enemies will always find weapons to use against you, the ones in the journal or others,’ I said.

‘Just imagine those memoirs in the hands of Lafaurie, or Lachaume, or young Lambert. Or in the hands of any journalist, for that matter,’ Robert said.

Cut off completely from politics, from the future, from the public, not even knowing whether his journal would ever be published, Robert had rediscovered in its writing the adventure of the explorer venturing into an unnamed wilderness at random, without a trail to follow, without signs to warn him of its dangers. In my opinion, he had never written anything better. ‘If you become involved in politics,’ I said impatiently, ‘then you no longer have the right to write sincere books. Is that it?’

‘No, you can write sincere books but not scandalous ones,’ Robert replied. ‘And you know very well that nowadays there are a thousand things a man can’t speak about without causing a scandal.’ He smiled. ‘To tell the truth there isn’t much about any individual that doesn’t lend itself to scandal.’

We walked a few steps in silence and then I said, ‘You spent three years writing those memoirs. Doesn’t it bother you to leave them lying in the bottom of a drawer?’

‘I’ve stopped thinking about them. I have another book on my mind now.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘I’ll tell you all about it in a few days.’

I looked at Robert suspiciously. ‘And do you really believe you’ll find enough time to write?’

‘Of course.’

‘It doesn’t seem that certain to me. At the moment you don’t have a minute to yourself.’

‘In politics, it’s the beginning that’s the hardest. Afterwards you can take it easier.’

His voice sounded too confident. ‘And what if it doesn’t become easier?’ I persisted. ‘Would you get out of politics or would you stop writing?’

‘You know, it really wouldn’t be a great tragedy if I stopped writing for a little while,’ Robert answered with a smile. ‘I’ve scribbled a lot of words on a lot of paper in my life!’

I felt a wrench at my heart. ‘Just the other day you were saying your best works are still ahead of you.’

‘And I still think so. But they can wait a while.’

‘How long? A month? A year? Ten years?’ I asked.