The Mandarins

‘You’re very lovely tonight,’ I said.

She looked at herself quickly in one of the large mirrors. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said sadly. ‘I’m lovely.’

She was indeed beautiful, but under her eyes there were deep circles that matched the colour of her dress. At heart she knew very well that Henri could have taken her to Portugal. She knew much more than she pretended to know.

‘You must be very happy; your party’s a great success.’

‘Henri loves parties so much,’ Paula said, her hands, heavy with rings, mechanically smoothing her shimmering silk dress.

‘Won’t you sing something for us? I’d so much like to hear you sing again.’

‘Sing?’ she said, surprised.

‘Yes, sing,’ I replied laughingly. ‘Have you forgotten that you used to sing once upon a time?’

‘Once – but that was long ago,’ she answered.

‘Not any more it isn’t. Now it’s like old times again.’

‘Do you really think so?’ Paula asked, staring intently into my eyes. She seemed to be peering into a crystal ball somewhere beyond my face. ‘Do you think it’s possible to bring back the past?’

I knew how she wanted me to answer that question, but with a slightly embarrassed laugh I said only, ‘I don’t know; I’m not an oracle.’

‘I must get Robert to explain the meaning of time to me,’ she said meditatively.

She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal. I was afraid for her. She had been well aware during these past four years that Henri no longer felt anything more than a wearied affection for her. But ever since the liberation, I don’t know what insane hope had awakened in her heart.

‘Do you remember the Negro spiritual I used to like so much? Won’t you sing it for us?’

She walked over to the piano and lifted the keyboard cover. Her voice seemed slightly hollow, but it was just as moving as ever. ‘You know, she ought to appear in public again,’ I said to Henri, who greeted my words with a look of astonishment. When the applause died down, he went over to Nadine and began dancing with her. I didn’t like the way she was looking at him. There was nothing I could do to help her, either. I had given her my only decent dress and lent her my prettiest necklace; that was all I had the power to do. I knew it would be useless to probe her dreams; all she needed was the love Lambert was so anxious to give her. But how could I prevent her from destroying it, as I knew she ultimately would? And yet when Lambert entered the room, she raced down the little stairway from the top of which she had been surveying us with a look of disapproval. She stopped dead on the last step, embarrassed by her too-open display of affection.

Lambert walked over to her and smiled gravely. ‘I’m glad you came,’ he said.

‘The only reason I came was to see you,’ she said brusquely.

He looked handsome this evening in his dark, well-cut suit. He always dresses with the studied severity of a person much older than himself; he has ceremonious ways, a sober voice, and he exercises a very careful control over his smiles. But his confused look and the softness of his mouth betray his youthfulness. Nadine, obviously, is at once flattered by his seriousness and reassured by his weakness.

‘Did you have a good time?’ she asked, looking at him with an affable, somewhat silly expression. ‘I hear that Alsace is very beautiful.’

‘Once a place is militarized, you know, it becomes utterly dismal.’

They sat down on one of the steps of the stairway, chatted, danced, and laughed together for quite a long while. And then they began to argue. With Nadine it always ended like that. Lambert, a sullen look on his face, was now sitting next to the heater, and Nadine was standing by the stairway. Bringing them together from opposite ends of the room and joining their hands was completely out of the question.

I walked over to the buffet and poured myself a brandy. My eyes glanced down along my black skirt and stopped at my legs. It was funny to think I had legs; no one ever noticed them, not even myself. They were slender and well-shaped in their beige stockings, certainly no less well-shaped than many another pair. And yet one day they’d be buried in the earth without ever having existed. It seemed unfair. I was still absorbed in contemplating them when Scriassine came over to me.

‘You don’t seem to be having a very good time,’ he said.

‘Well, I’m doing the best I can.’

‘Too many young people here. Young people are never gay. And far too many writers.’ He pointed his chin towards Lenoir, Pelletier, and Cange. ‘They’re all writers, aren’t they?’

‘Every one of them.’

‘And you, do you write, too?’

‘God, no!’ I said, laughing.

I liked his brusque manner. Like everyone else, I had read his famous book, The Red Paradise. But I had been especially moved by his book on Austria under the Nazis. It was something much more than a mere journalistic account; it was an impassioned testimony. He had fled Austria after having fled Russia and finally became a naturalized French citizen. But he had spent the last four years in America and we had met him for the first time only this autumn. Almost immediately he began calling Robert and Henri by their first names, but he never seemed to notice that I existed.

‘I wonder what’s going to become of them,’ he said, turning his eyes from me.

‘Who?’

‘The French in general and these people here in particular.’

I studied his triangular face with its prominent cheekbones, its hard, fiery eyes, its thin, almost feminine mouth. It wasn’t at all the face of a Frenchman. To him Russia was an enemy nation, and he did not have any great love for the United States. There wasn’t a place on earth where he really felt at home.

‘I returned from New York on an English boat,’ he said with a slight smile. ‘One day the steward said to me, “The poor French! They don’t know if they won the war or lost it.” It seems to me that that sums up the situation rather well.’

There was an irritating complacency in his voice. ‘I don’t think it matters much what kind of tag you put on things that happened in the past,’ I said. ‘What does matter is the future.’

‘That’s just it,’ he said spiritedly. ‘To make something good of the future, you have to look the present in the face. And I get the distinct impression that these people here aren’t doing that at all. Dubreuilh talks to me of a literary review, Perron of a pleasure trip. They all seem to feel they’ll be able to go on living just like before the war.’

‘And of course, you were sent from heaven to open their eyes,’ I said dryly.

Scriassine smiled. ‘Do you know how to play chess?’

‘Very poorly.’

He continued to smile and all trace of pedantry vanished from his face – we were intimate friends, accomplices, had known each other since childhood. ‘He’s working his Slavic charm on me,’ I thought. And as a matter of fact, the charm worked; I smiled back at him.

‘When I’m just watching chess, I can spot good moves more clearly than the players themselves, even if I’m not as good at the game as they are. Well, that’s the way it is here; I’m an outsider, an onlooker, so I can pretty well see what’s in store for you people.’

‘What?’

‘An impasse.’

‘An impasse? What do you mean by that?’

Suddenly, I found myself anxiously awaiting his reply. We had all been living together in such a tightly sealed circle for so long a time, with no intrusions by outsiders, any witnesses, that this man from without troubled me.

‘French intellectuals are facing an impasse. It’s their turn now,’ he added with a kind of satisfaction. ‘Their art, their philosophies can continue to have meaning only within the framework of a certain kind of civilization. And if they want to save that civilization, they’ll have no time or energy left over to give to art or philosophy.’

‘This isn’t the first time Robert’s been active in politics,’ I said. ‘And it never before stopped him from writing.’

‘Yes, in ’34 Dubreuilh gave a great deal of his time to the struggle against fascism,’ Scriassine said in his suave voice. ‘But to him, that struggle seemed morally reconcilable with literary preoccupations.’ With a slight trace of anger, he added, ‘In France, the pressure of history has never been felt in all its urgency. But in Russia, in Austria, in Germany, it was impossible to escape it. That’s why I, for example, was never able to write.’

‘But you have written.’