PARIS CONFERENCE

1

The apartment, high in a pillared, lemon-tinted crescent off rue des Cinq-Fils, had a largeness unrelated to size, considerable though this was. Light from oblong windows flowed with radiance, promise; space was extended by blue-and-white arches replacing doors, by the Juan Gris, Derain, Matisse reaching deep into an atmosphere leisured and calm. Flowers glowed on Buhl tables, white ledges; stone carvings glimmered in alcoves, silvery, grey, roseate, spiky and metallic, one, more tender, of a nude oriental girl, was cut, I always thought, by Wilfrid himself. Two bronze Cambodian Buddhas were slyly humorous. Tiny enamel boxes, jewels in antique settings, Persian miniatures, tiles decorated with heraldic stags, with butterflies, even a Viennese lorgnon, gleamed beneath books precisely arranged to their language. Prints, folios, maps, were stacked in gold-and-black Louis Quinze cabinets, and, in a small octagonal study, shelves of records: Mozart and Haydn quartets, alongside such chanteurs as Sablon, Trenet and Piaf. ‘I agree’, Wilfrid said, ‘with Cellini, that an architect should be adept not only in draughtsmanship but in music.’

From above our crescent we would contemplate night-time Paris: a gigantic illuminated S, a neon spray across steep slanted roofs, a spire above dim, massed trees, the floodlit Column balancing the Dôme, then Sacré Cœur, aloft, like a bright, unblinking eye.

I might sit with him as he worked. Sometimes he talked without looking up, pausing when flowers or cut-glass moved from shadows into a flake of sunlight.

Throughout, the telephone rang, Wilfrid patiently, leniently, listening to pleas, complaints, enquiries, then suggesting a scheme, recommending a doctor, bank, hotel, often with a minute demur, small joke, murmur of comfort.

I heard him name the best available chocolates, an inexpensive but reliable Left Bank restaurant, the last Nazi Governor of Paris, a Jacob Wasserman novel, a youth hostel to be avoided, the whereabouts of an SS fugitive, the inadvisability of a wedding night in a wagon-lit.

‘Wilfrid, you overdo it. Some take advantage.You’re a permanent Court of Appeal.’

‘That, wouldn’t you say, is better than a Supreme Court.’

Sometimes I considered him not a court but an astrologer, advising on cosmetic surgery, the outcome of a peace congress, the desirability of an abortion.

Lisette, cheerful, assiduous, grateful for some past, unrevealed services, came daily to housekeep. To my curiosity about her he replied that he preferred paintings without too many details. ‘Lisette is on terms with her neighbours.Very bad terms.’

Minor housework was provided by myself and Marc-Henri, dark in eyes, skin, personality, younger than me and of similar amorphous status. Slight, he was uncommunicative yet knowing and unfailingly resentful of me. No more than of Lisette did I know his origins. He would stand at a mirror ruffling his black, crêpe-like hair, restyling; then shaking it back to its usual sprawl. My attempts at conversation he would interrupt by saying he had lost interest. Occasionally, he deigned to play tennis with me, his hectic anxiety to win costing him too many points.Wilfrid, he said, was the better player, ‘by not too much’. He spoke with the grudge habitual when forced to admit another’s superiority. His incessant loss of interest guaranteed that I had lost mine, and we co-existed in armed truce, poison-sacs not dried but in abeyance.

Nothing could detract from my elation at the gifts of a city at peace: I was a child thrilled by the infinite promise of Tomorrow, free to wander through summer charting the half-real Paris of Revolution, Empire, Occupation, absorbing as a murder trail. Statues, churches, monuments, parks, street names – rue du Pasteur-Wagner, rue des Grands-Augustins, rue Gambetta, rue du Temple, place Victor-Hugo.

Over twenty, I was stateless, rather sententiously regarding myself as European, emotionally independent, uncluttered by petty allegiances, though requiring temporary visas, unreliable permits. Adenauer’s West Germany was vigorously productive but no more alluring than a millionaire’s swimming pool. East Germany was a Soviet satellite.Where, Goethe had demanded, does Germany lie, where is the whole? Incessant revelations of the Third Reich finally amputated ancestral hallucinations; only Pahlen was left unsmirched. Germania had been a brawling Valhalla, prettified into Thuringian Grail-seekers, operatic robber-knights, Hollywood castles. The Hohenstaufen were forgotten, the Meistersingers were silent, Goethe and Schiller at one with the White Rose. Thomas Mann dared his protests but from America.

Romance was very plainly an outcome of distance and song. Ballads dripped blood. A gilded coach, hussar’s belt, ‘Merry Widow Waltz’, cherry-and-chocolate torte were no more than themselves. Lohengrin farewell.

I must shove away

distant shores

to mortal feet unbidden.

Newspapers were daily jolts from the wider world. Reconstruction had steadied European chaos but had not arrested the drift into what was being called the Cold War. Korea, Berlin Air Lift, tensions between the two Germanies, Eastern Bloc. Despite nominal protests from Washington and London, Stalin, grimly unassailable, had planted Estonia with Russians, the native professional classes shredded by deportations, gaolings, executions.

I read that Jodl had been hanged, Laval shot, Pétain sentenced to death, then sent to life imprisonment. Mon Général, contemptuous of boulevards stacked with jeering communists, had stalked away into history though his very absence made him inescapable, the affronted saviour capable of a second coming. General Halder, rescued from Dachau after accusation of complicity in the July Plot, was reported by Paris-Match to be collaborating with American historians. From Nuremburg, as from Paris a century and a half earlier, came the monotonous bleat, ‘But I only obeyed orders.’ The concentration camp, Buchenwald, near Goethe’s home, was now a Soviet Transit Camp, fatal for traitors, speculators, class enemies.

As if countenancing my resistance to opportunities in West Germany, Wilfrid passed me an envelope. I extracted the dossier of Herr Ludwig Ramdohr, ‘Protector of the Poor and Oppressed’, Chief of the Ravensbrück Political Department, recently hanged for torture, despite relatives insisting on his love of nature and all living things. ‘Walking in the country, he sometimes gave queer little jumps to avoid crushing a snail or a lizard.’

Wilfrid listened as he might to Socrates or Buddha, to my account of the Turret, islands, Forest, the girl who ran. ‘You will not’, his sigh was perfunctory, ‘inherit the Grafschalt of Diephlz or the more cosmopolitan Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and you have never reminded me of Heinrich der Lowe, save, of course, in physique …’ he was resigned to making the best of my deprivations, ‘but you have very well understood that line of Baudelaire’s about the world appearing limitless by lamplight.’

When I mentioned Stefan George, he was at once sombre, light-blue eyes elsewhere. ‘We grew away from him, necessarily. But from such as he we learnt that poetry was more than idealized feelings that come too easily. Poetry, you may agree, should be more like a rock face. He spoke ten languages, desired, I think, some international aristocracy of the sensitive and gifted, yet craved and received disciples, surely a weakness.Always. They poisoned him with incense. But he refused temptations from Goebbels. An honourable epitaph, earned by rather too few. If you look at the great musicians …’

I did not do so. Having spoken of my attempts to write, I now wondered whether he was obliquely urging me to resume. I also remembered the Herr General’s Ten Per Cent.

2

On a winter morning, a hush like a pall descended over Europe unknown since the Pact, since Hiroshima. By afternoon, the entire world, San Francisco to Yokohama, Cairo to Shanghai, had halted. Parisians were moving as if on tiptoe, traffic almost vanished, voices lowered, radios seemed charged with supernatural magnetism. Stalin was dead.

He had terrorized millions, killed his people on a scale unprecedented. Co-author of the Pact, he had been vindictive, paranoiac terrorist: in Estonia, he was Bear Ogre, Red Sky Master, fanged Forest Uncle, Bandit in the Fur Coat and, placatingly, Sweetest Old One.Yet for the lonely, timid, drifting and the vengeful he had been a chastening Father, supernal Judge, towering, protective granite, his removal letting in light but opening into the unknown. We read that, in the gulags, even slaves had wept.

Gradually, numbness wore off, clamour began. A new name, Khrushchev, had hailed Stalin as the Father of Mankind. Supported by Sartre, Picasso declared him representing historical maturity. The Red Belt in eastern Paris held a monster parade with banners, huge portraits, music; the Right distributed pamphlets asserting that on Stalin’s orders French communists had collaborated with Germans during the early Occupation, later usurping total credit for the Resistance. Humanité retorted by faking 1940 newspapers headlining Red demands for courage to defend Paris.

More soberly, there was anticipation of danger. The Allied Air Lift had secured West Berlin, defeating Stalin’s plans, but now, in Korea, the UN armies, the USA and Britain foremost, had lost to Russian-backed Chinese on the Yalu. Fourteen thousand Soviet tanks were reported poised to ram Western Europe on the whim of another unproved figure, Malenkov. Officially confirmed was the explosion of the Soviet H-bomb.

Unease was tempered by spring warmth, and all Paris was open to me. ‘Knock, and I will open.’ None knew me, none would pursue me. Without responsibilities, I had obligations only to Wilfrid and was profligate with well-being.

Many Sections were shabby from neglect, shortages, occupation. I was puzzled by ‘Vive Charlemagne’ daubed on a crumbling façade, until learning that a volunteer French Charlemagne Division had been dispatched to defend the shrinking Reich.Wartime jokes were still scattered: Fraternité, Servilité, Lavalité.

Shops, posters, chirpy markets, awnings were dazzling, laughter immoderate, greetings passionate, Quartier Latin diverting as Offenbach, the parks dainty as Perrault. Syncopation swirled down boulevards, subsiding in Faubourg Saint-Germain where shuttered mansions stood sedate above parquet-smooth lawns. I climbed Montmartre, once, briefly, wildly, renamed Mont Marat, though here I attracted glances, sneaky, unfriendly, unavoidable as Marc-Henri’s, recognizing me as no insouciant European above the battle but an unpolished German, kinsman of Ramdohr and Jodl.

Central galleries and arcades overflowed with colour, lovers played each other like guitars, passing entwined, carefree and beautiful, to some plein air table or bar. I found quai Voltaire bookstalls; all was intensified by summer known to Monet, Pissaro, Renoir: flounced trees, speckled water, sketchily trimmed clouds, gay caps and swinging skirts, pirouettes and smiles from cabaret and bistro. Illusions of opera hats, elegant cravats, layered crinolines of the Second Empire and the sleepy gaze of its sensational yet secretive ruler. Flimsy dresses, bare flesh, young leaves were reflected in pools, birds were smart and indifferent as mannequins. Stories flickered on all sides, begging to be remembered. At Port Royal a woman ate feathers, at rue Montaigne an ex-porter endlessly bowed, thanked passers-by, opened the door of an imaginary hotel.

Prostitutes, or likely prostitutes, damped my lust though stinging my curiosity. Reputedly they had profiteered under the Occupation and, like southern peasants, resented the stingier days of Liberation. Many might have born a new, hybrid population growing up around us, perhaps shoots of an improved New Order. Their murmurs, ‘You coming?’ ‘What’s the hurry, mein Herr?’ were troubling, like an unpleasant scent or jarring tune. Safer, more invigorating, was to lean on Pont Saint-Louis, looking down-river before reaching quai d’ Anjou, wrapped in another hush, that of high, barred seventeenth-century exteriors, austere, legalistic, where no street children twisted hula-hoops, chanted obscene ditties, taunted strangers, romped with a glee I had forgotten at Meinnenberg. When I examined Saint-Sulpice towers from the Gardens, children reappeared but expensively clad, on ponies, sailing toy yachts, rushing for ice cream, shrieking on a hobgoblin merry-go-round. All was rich, sensual theatre: stench from Les Halles, fluttering perfume from a midinette. Other words revived: chatelaine, seneschal, oriflamme.

Sometimes Wilfrid accompanied me. Then the pace, the encounters, were different, the occasions less brittle, sometimes pointed. He would be greeted in parks, a Lebanese bar, a café and, at the place Vendôme, by a grey, stocky man, the painter Max Ernst. Friend, also monitor, he was casually training me to see the familiar at angles slightly tilted. One square, hitherto unremarkable, was place Fabien.

‘Fabien?’

‘Colonel Fabien. Reverenced for killing an unarmed Nazi youth in 1941, thus causing the shooting of forty French hostages.’

Silenced, I looked around at the glittering traffic: all as usual, though last week eleven Algerian militants had been found dead in Canal Saint-Martin, and a demonstration was planned, to commemorate Philippe Henriot, radio propagandist murdered by de Gaulle’s partisans in the last months of the war. The protean nature of Paris. Of Europe.

Wilfrid led me to historic cafés, some with names familiarized since the Revolution: Coupole, Flore, Lapin Agile, Fouquet’s, Pro-cope, Tortini’s, Closerie des Lilas, l’Eléphant; the celebrities argued on the Dôme terrace, at the Rotunda and Deux Magots, sometimes with greetings tossed at him too rapidly for me to translate. More cafés on sunlit boulevard des Italiens, more bookstalls at rue de Montpellier, where he bought me Rilke’s Späte Gedichte, which, while banishing my poetic flounderings, stuck like a dart thrown by a friendly hand, and retrieved an overworld, illimitable, of gardens, wistful animals, some visible though imaginary, grave children, woodland pools, a gleaming, barely reachable Villa d’Este, fruitful dissonances, exacting harmonies, nuanced silence.

Music! Breathing of statues, perhaps,

stillness of pictures.

Like Father, he enlarged me by tact. ‘I would like your opinion of this …’ A biography of Rosa Luxemburg. ‘You might find this encouraging …’ Thomas Mann. ‘This may be worth a glance …’ Feurbach, on the Individual in History.

He liked to walk unhurriedly to some Seine inn or unfashionable Section, through Maupassant insets: card players at an outside table, children breathless before falsetto puppets, laundry-women quarrelling. He particularly favoured a small Gascon restaurant near rue Hachette, its tiny garden shaded by a plane tree and trellised vines. The burly patron and his wife greeted him like a generous uncle, with whom to converse, not swap chat. Ordering a bottle, requesting a sauce, he was always tentative, then very grateful. A bill was never presented, a bottle always slipped into his briefcase.

In a new, modish gallery, jittery with embraces and compliments, smiles as if painted, a small, dapper gentleman squeaked recognition, greedily swallowed Wilfrid’s studied felicitations on his latest poem. ‘A mishap,’ Wilfrid murmured, on leaving, ‘Laval’s cousin, with a record, at best, unhygienic. Of considerable talent, though the question is …’

The question remained unspoken.

His company induced sensations of being in a movie, where taxis arrive at a beckon, the choicest table is readily available, theatre tickets are unnecessary. Ever solicitous, he tolerated my anecdotes of Mirabeau, Desmoulins, Brissot, indeed encouraged them. ‘Can you tell me, Erich …?’ ‘Is it true that …?’ rarely and apologetically, as if risking affront to my omniscience. Patient, respectful as he might be to Bergson, Proust, Maritain, he would demur with accomplished diffidence. ‘But would you not also agree … ?’ his humour so self-deprecatory that his sudden, barely controlled laugh was always a shock.

Hearing of Father’s repugnance for Hegel, he said nothing but, finding a book, showed me ‘The Function of the Authentic State is to behave as if the Individual does not Exist.’

He knew the antique shops, lovingly studying a curved Siamese blade that Malraux could have identified or stolen, a secretaire at which Zola or Flaubert could have sat, a mirror topped with glass centaurs that, perhaps, had reflected Manon Roland, Josephine Beauharnais, Madame Tallien. One painting appealed to me, a sunset, fête galante, autumnal, with an empty swing, satined courtiers departing through glades, a satyr leering through decayed leaves. A vanished European imagination delicately preserved. I dared not, however, show feelings, for Wilfrid, with generosity never ostentatious but a matter of course, would have bought it for me, together with an equivalent purchase for Marc-Henri, who would take it only to keep level with myself.

In a small cinema near rue des Archives, I was introduced to pre-war movies of Clair, Duvivier, Ophuls, Carné, Lubitch, the tender and lyrical rescued from sentimentality by witty ironies, sceptical undertones, an occasional hint of foreboding. We might end in the Vieux-Colombier night club.Wilfrid attentive to jazz and girls, once, very dispassionately, dancing with a heavily made-up, blonde ex-star, long workless from flaunting her wartime liaison with a Gestapo chief. I could not penetrate the motives prompting this gesture but suspected that he liked, as it were, to make typical the untypical.

‘There is,’ he once announced, ‘a special picture we might inspect.’ Braque? Poussin? But no. In a ‘particular reservation’ we were soon watching a Judy Garland musical through which, save for that rare but disconcerting hoot of laughter, he sat rigid, in devotion to blazing tunes, Garland’s bouncy fling, the bizarre troupes and montages. Afterwards, the manager, as if pleading, beckoned him away for a few minutes behind a door sternly closed.

He had his foibles: one, a distaste for bowler hats, derived, he maintained, from connoisseurship of the œuvre of Laurel and Hardy.

In gracious parks we sauntered between chestnuts, hedges, sculpture, fountains, many still unrepaired from wartime depredations. Down an alley a cart waited, stocked with tools, pans, cutlery, caged pigeons, while blue-shirted men, probably, Wilfrid considered, on leave from the National Assembly, disputed with expletives older than Richelieu. As if in afterthought, he led me to the fragments of the medieval Episcopal palace in Cour de Rohan where a new restaurant was everywhere advertised though not yet built.We paced the cobbles of narrow rue Saint-André-des-Arts, its peace unimpaired by Cadillacs and buses. Under the spire of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, we heard the bells that tolled the Bartholomew Massacre and, at Thermidor, had summoned the virtuous to rescue Robespierre and Saint-Just.

Later, he crossed an avenue to indicate polished windows and an intricately wrought balcony.

‘Behind them dwells in some state M. René Bousquet.’

‘An artist?’

‘In his way, I suppose.’ He was more resigned than enthusiastic. ‘Courageous, versatile. Lawyer, first class. Economist. Currently, he heads the Banque d’Indo-Chine, no starting post for the lame. Le Monde is praising him as the best-dressed gentleman in Paris.’

He continued to gaze upwards, like an actor – Jouvet, Gabin, Brasseur, Barrault – savouring a key line before delivering it.

‘In July 1942, during the Vichy Collaboration, defined by M. Laval as the Politics of Understanding, Bousquet was Pétain’s police secrétaire générale. Eichmann sent him notice that all Jews must be deported, but for the while he would be content with only the adults. Bousquet was obliging enough to add, on his own initiative, ten thousand children. He was forecast as a future Premier of France, one of the custodians of Western civilization, by Laval, Heydrich and Himmler.’

‘But surely …’

‘Yes. Last year he was belatedly denounced and indeed tried. He admitted all charges, rather eloquently, with the further, gratuitous, information that he had extended his searches into the Unoccupied Zone.’

‘And?’

‘The judges committed the impertinence of sentencing him to five years’ imprisonment, but he was immediately released on his further plea of services to the Resistance, though in sad truth he had already repaired, I think, to Stuttgart.You must, if you care for a sight of this notable product of La Belle France, wait until after dark.’

In English-style blazer, white, with plum-coloured edges, and blue, carelessly knotted ‘flare’, he attracted many glances, curious, respectful, though, as if unaware of them, he was already moving from the pastel-hued apartment block and gracious limes. ‘I think, Erich, that as an antidote to coarser subjects, and before our friend accepts his Nobel Peace Prize, we should allow ourselves an instant of respect to another humanitarian, in whom you must have specialized information.’

Gambetta? Jaurès? Pasteur? Curie? Rolland?

We were soon facing a nondescript triangular house, neglected or unoccupied, with barred windows, padlocked gate, on the corner of Cour de Commerce and rue d’Ancienne Comédie.

‘The home, Erich, of one of your natural subjects. A minor specimen. Guillotin. Dr Joseph Ignace Guillotin. He congratulated himself, sincerely and, I judge, correctly, on his recipe to cure intolerable and needless pain.’

Returning, he said little. I, too, was thoughtful, my optimism chastened. Yet, after all, so much was stable and reassuring. The poplars rustled unchanged, a fountain purled as it might have done for Lully and Racine, a girl in a green hat, perennial gamine, thinking herself unobserved, put out her tongue at the sky, a tramp with drunken dignity rebuked a commissionaire braided and tasselled as an Italian admiral, the copper beech glistened immemorially against gold-tipped gates. Feudal and classical emblems emblazoning porticoes were imperturbable. My misgivings had already shifted to desire, not for political enlightenment but for girls, Calypsos from ‘Ogygia’ with men at their finger-tips.

Wilfrid, I knew, was deliberately warning me, not against girls but the deceptions of peace.Witty café repartee, volatile students, a Tati film, the songs of Greco and Piaf could induce tourist coma, catch me off-guard, for, though Paris was not Meinnenberg, I had been mistaken in thinking it only Hugo’s City of Light. A Resistance plaque, bullet holes in opulent Hôtel Crillon, anti-Semitic and Stalinist scrawls in a pissoir were running reminders of what had destroyed Mother, Father, the Herr General. I should be more watchful. A dark blue June sky recalled the eyes of the Gutter King.

Certain words had lost holiday innocence: Camp, Comrade, Cattle Truck, Shed, Fence were short-cuts to horror, as, long ago, had been Rope, Cross, Tumbrel. Certain words also were immovable: Jazz, Rose, Corot.

3

The Red Cross was never to discover my parents’ fates, save that Mother had died in Berlin in 1943, ‘in unfavourable circumstances’. Wilfrid’s legal acquaintances eventually divulged that some financial inheritance was secured for me in a London bank, not large but sufficient to allow me independence, a labyrinth preserving me against that never quite credible sha.

Much remained wavering, uncertain. I had a dream of Mother, incredulous, weeping, desolate, being knifed by the Herr General.

Journalists now listed him amongst those arraigned at Kiev as a war criminal. Should he have escaped with his life, he would be in some far-north slave camp. About his actual crimes they were silent. Dogged by old loyalties, I did not speak of him to Wilfrid until I joined him in Paris. ‘By your account,’ he said, ‘a gentleman of some irony, rather less of compassion.’

Loyalties matter, despite my Goethean pretensions of being the temperate, objective European. British and Germans must have perished in the war, all deeming themselves righteous.

Loyal, of course, to Wilfrid, I often, possibly too often, shrank from straining his patience, to over-impose. He had too many plausible identities – patrician factotum, cool philanthropist, wily ringmaster – for me to completely surrender to his kindness. His dislike of physical contacts, even handshaking – another Robespierre trait – could be forbidding. His activities were presumably charitable: he was reported amongst some prominent figures intervening for homosexuals rescued from the camps yet still interned, the Nazi sexual prohibitions inscrutably retained by the Allied administrators. I never enquired: friends, like inferior novelists, could know too much.

He was often absent, abroad for several weeks, returning without notice, greeting us as if he had never left. Such intervals were difficult, for Marc-Henri was unflaggingly peevish and aloof, jostling his hair, ungracious, hurriedly disappearing after meals. Virtually silent, I overheard him mutter, ‘I can do it. Myself.’ Wilfrid scrupulously kept balance between us, taking him to expensive restaurants, the Folies, bowling alleys, but failed to appease.

No matter. I had my labyrinth, winding back into other Paris summers. History was everywhere visible, so vibrant that it hurt. The streets paraded more than the wounds of Resistance and Collaboration. Abruptly confronting me, on the site of his home in the vanished rue des Cordeliers, reared an apparition, one arm upflung, the other protecting a child, a leg thrust forward, a rough, atrocious, defiant face, Danton’s statue. L’Audace. On Pont Neuf at sundown he had exclaimed, ‘Look! All that blood! The waters are turning scarlet!’ Later, instigator of the Revolutionary Tribunal, he had added that he sometimes felt chased by shades of the dead. In Musée Carnavelet, startling as Show Trial or Pact, was exhibited a long table glimmering with worn baize, at which the Committee of General Security had decreed lists for the string-haired Public Prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, whom Lenin admired and, in a manner, Uncle Joe had employed. But I was only obeying orders. On that table, agonized in his last hours, Robespierre had been dumped like rubbish.

I stood pilgrim in place de la Concorde, where another voyeur had watched the King’s execution, tasted the blood dripping from the scaffold and pronounced it vilely salt. Alongside rue Cassette was the Carmes convent, still revering a pile of skulls, where the September Massacres had gathered pace.

One afternoon, sultry and overcast, was appropriate décor for a particular mission, in which Marc-Henri would have choked in haste to lose interest. Mist distorted the Sainte-Chapelle almost to crookedness: then the vast blur of Notre Dame, looming as if supernaturally detached from moorings and about to drift down river. Outside, Templars had screamed in the fires of a monstrous frame-up.

I crossed quai de l’Horloge, past an optician’s exécution rapide, to a glistening heap of old, turreted buildings, to present a card signed by a grandee friend of Wilfrid. This procured reluctant admission to one of those black pockets of history lurking in all great cities, scraps from a séance. I was now within the Conciergerie, its crepuscular heights and depths overcharged with the dusty, inquisitorial stillness, sunless as if stricken by winter. No one escorted me, none was about, though a lesson from Meinnenberg was that I was never unwatched. Those who had suffered here – Corday, Marie-Antoinette, Danton, Chénier, Brissot – were no longer quite real, messy colours drifting into the blind.

Near by, off a grand staircase, would have been an apartment with sumptuous Gobelins carpets and that long green table, now at the Carnavalet, at which, in another Great Wrath, forerunners of Polit-Bureaux had legislated and argued for the Perfect Society. One ponderous arch opened on to a courtyard, cold, hemmed in by walls looking incomplete in the hanging mist, desolate as Nineveh. From a rusty tap Lucile Desmoulins and the Queen must have drunk. Buried near this chilled, sooty maze was the Tribunal Hall where Fouquier-Tinville had signed away lives. In my most humourless reaches I moved through a miasma of Gothic slabs, narrow steps twisting up to doors iron and padlocked, stone panels, grilled cells, sodden, almost fungoid oubliettes, cobwebbed tunnels lit only from slits. I heard, or thought I heard, a footfall, in a paralysis of time deranged as the Girondins’ last night.

My trail was not yet finished, so, on another day, in rue Saint-Honoré, between a hairdresser’s and bakery, with crisp, pungent smells, three youths joking over a photograph, I penetrated a drab passage to a yard faintly thickened by liquor and shadowed by old, two-storied houses. Ahead, from behind a faded green door throbbed orientalized jazz, high wails above measured drums. Visible through dirty rectangular glass, dark heads and shoulders of Algerians were ranked at a bar, the establishment bereft of the name that had once spread across Europe. Waiters in soiled white coats were crossing, re-crossing with tall glasses, from the radio the wails were prolonged, then collapsing into fragments of memory, always unresolved, beneath the apartment once owned by a sober, respected cabinet-maker, proud of his lodger, Maximilien Maria Isidore de Robespierre, whose gaze, like a searchlight, had once paralysed a deputy. ‘He’ll be suspecting I am thinking of something.’

4

‘Have you ever thought, Erich, of any of these new arrangements in West Germany? Some seem so exciting.’

Lisette, polishing silver, had spoken lightly, perhaps too lightly, for there might lurk a hint of reproach in the plump, motherly face, always so affectionate beneath the dark hair, which Wilfrid told her resembled a bursting bag. I knew that she preferred Marc-Henri to myself and suspected she was scheming to be rid of me, though at once admitting exaggeration of a proposal actually well meant.Yet she persisted.’ Herr Wilfrid has often told me of how you helped in … that place.You told stories, people listened, they were calmed …’

As if repenting of indiscretion or untoward interference, she gave me another smile, still more motherly, pressed my hand, polished a knife with sufficient energy to recharge a battery.

True, I was idle, in an era of recovery, rebuilding, rehabilitation, the fresh breath of revival. But Lisette had chosen a bad day.Wilfrid was always receiving parcelled documents, cuttings, transcriptions, some of which he might leave open on a table, certainly not for Marc-Henri, for whom Final Solutions, Pacts, Show Trials were at best worth a shrug. They would frequently be absurd or whimsical. A murderer from Alsace had offered Laval as character reference. An SS lieutenant on trial was pleading that the hanging of gypsies during the Thirty Years War gave legal precedent for his own disposal of four thousand Jews. Wilfrid himself could be tempting me to venture abroad by providing novels by young German writers – Grass, Böll – humane but realistic, harsh to their elders. Certainly, he, very courteous, very grateful, declined my offers to assist him, filing, paraphrasing, carrying messages, as if anxious to spare me tedium best left to the ageing.

Whether or not trivial, the incident with Lisette troubled me during subsequent weeks.Would I have risked joining the July Plot, joining Stauffenberg in placing the bomb beneath the Führer’s table? Only had Wilfrid ordered it, and a Wilfrid never gives orders. What else had I inherited from Mother? Timidity.

After too much wine, to test my courage, I attempted to stab my hand but only damaged a table of some value, an action noticed by Marc-Henri. In unwonted verbiage he referred to it as Existentialist Absurdity, Wilfrid annoying me by a nod of agreement.

When a dinner guest mentioned Aktion Sühnezeichen, young German Christians spending vacations in expiating German guilt in helping in bomb-devastated cities, I professed indifference with only a tinge of insincerity. I was not Christian, I had renounced Germanhood, I had nothing to expiate.

England remained more attractive than a Fourth Reich or the communist-policed East. Thousands had wept, sung English songs, cheered, when a red London bus toured wretched Europe as symbol of normality restored. Today, in cafés and cabarets, I was provoked by hearing the English, unforgiven for deserting France in 1940, ridiculed as philistine, pretentious, hypocritical.

English cousins might await me, antique doors wide open, on their tough island, with its northern stoicism, farmyard humour, its writers, its stiff gentlemen so easily parodied, less easily embarrassed or outwitted. A people immune to the rhetoric that had convulsed Italy, rotted much of France, destroyed Germany.

Wilfrid easily scented my preoccupations. ‘I have heard, though it may be untrue – history too often being at the mercy of literary men and a number of women – that, defeated in France, London under bombs, your Mr Churchill ordered the construction of landing craft, for eventual return to Europe. Some of his more intellectual colleagues, we hear, were ready to accept Hitler’s word and ponder his peace terms. Hitler’s word!’ He himself pondered. ‘Churchill, so often mistaken, his detractors not invariably right.’

That ‘your’, though unemphatic, was unpleasantly distinct, perhaps prelude to my dismissal to England.Yet it also recalled a day surely unsullied by the ulterior and suspect. We had visited a quiet mansion at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, once residence of an exiled English king.We lazed by a pool canopied by willows, gold-fish flicking between broad white lilies. As if from nothing, Wilfrid murmured, ‘Looking-glass Wonderland’. This, though in keeping with his ruminative mood, yet also chimed from far beyond this heightened pastoral afternoon, into my own dreaminess. Goal posts melted to lilies, tank-like dowagers transformed to redcoats and white smoke, dukes and committees coalesced into dense puddings under Sherlock’s terrible lens. Vast club armchairs and leathery books metamorphosed into pallid cliffs and lawnmowers, and I saw my grandmother as a shy girl watching from behind a fan the caustic old Queen.

Unaware of my self-satisfying visions, Wilfrid, beaky, like some allegorical bird in a missal, resumed the everyday, again rousing my very faint disquiet. ‘You might be respectfully astonished by their public schools, a misnomer, like so much in England. Quite possibly it was in this very garden of delights that Talleyrand declared that the best schools in the world were English public schools, and that they were dreadful.’

The thought of Lisette made that afternoon no longer innocuous, as though a calm, classical face abruptly showed in ugly profile.

Meanwhile, Paris itself was restless. Summer greens and golds, delicate morning haze, resplendent sunsets, children’s cries were unchanged, but political cat-calls had restarted. After a respite from denouncing Marshall Aid, Dollar Imperialism, the Bomb, and applauding Soviet support for small nations, the Left and Right were excited by a new movie, compendium of newsreels illustrating Jünger’s Diary of a German Officer, memoirs of Occupied Paris, in which French personalities famed and loved – Chevalier, Borotra, Arletty, Guitry, Luchaire – shining, complacent, were seen at a lavish Nazi reception, toadying to Ambassador Abetz. Riots rocked the cinema and spread throughout Paris, Lyons, Marseilles. Three bodies, dead, handcuffed together, were discovered at Saint-Cloud, a Jewish cemetery was desecrated, Vive le Maréchal stridently painted on the Column. Debonair Hotel Meurice, former Wehrmacht HQ, was picketed, and a lorry tipped a mass of dung on to rue de Saussies, beneath which had been Gestapo torture cells. A famous woman couturier was pushed from a balcony, almost fatally. Germany’s most celebrated operatic Isolde, interviewed on Radio Paris, was both hysterically applauded and attacked when, asked why she so zealously performed for the Führer’s court, replied with disdainful incredulity, ‘You should know that the artist is above society.’ The Left suffered minor reverse when Brother Jean-Luc, long-established Resistance martyr, was exposed as having been transported to Treblinka for seducing boys, 1943.

‘Good!’ Marc-Henri was at last stirred. ‘Very good.’

I now noticed, for the first time, that, eating in public places, Wilfrid always sat facing the door and street. It gave me a Draufgängertum, a creepy delight in danger.

Bastille Day was frenzied as always. On walls, pavements, vehicles, plinths, appeared stickers of a cross within a circle, insignia of an illegal anti-Arabic military cabal, whose plastic bombs had already shattered a street, blinding five children and killing three teachers outside a lycée. On boulevard de la Chapelle, I had to dodge a fight between rival pieds noir. That evening, attempting to wrest poetry from the infinite, I watched fireworks over Versailles, sapphires splintering, fiery diamonds encircling the zodiac, my verbal shots dead on reaching paper.

No poet, I was enveloped in a story, the plot not yet discernable and with either too many themes or none.

More urgent than bombs and Algerians, my body was protesting against sexual frustration. I was reluctant to consult Wilfrid, though I assumed he could have recommended a select maison. I could only dawdle on streets with the need but no courage to follow the inviting glance or ambiguous nod.

Could Wilfrid once have encountered some Medusa or luscious Ganymede, then covering wounds with irony and flippancy, while secreting passions he refused to fulfil? Once he made as if to touch my arm, then sharply desisted, as if remembering a dangerous current. Such restraint made the Herr General boisterous, almost ragtime, in his affections.

Our home was urbane, luxuriant, but chaste, and despite his multifarious acquaintances, Wilfrid seemed without intimacies. Lisette and Marc-Henri might know more but could scarcely be cross-examined. In contrast was his pleasure at the welcome always received from children. ‘Wilfrid’s come!’ He handled them, deftly, amiably, as he had done with everyone at Meinnenberg, once defusing a suspicious ten-year-old by enquiring whether he was still at school.With children, I myself was only ‘le Herr’.With them, as with animals, even flowers, he was gravely considerate, without flattery or condescension, aware of their desires for reassurance and equality.

I was embarrassed when he saw me, like Marc-Henri, before a mirror.

‘Your looks, Erich, could procure you at least a petit Trianon.’

My looks! Manifestly devoid of sexual appeal, eyes blue-green and humourless, face too northern, raw, high-boned, squarish under light hair. Under French scrutiny, I could have modelled for a Hitler Youth leader.

He often used words as though, for real communication, they were second best. His Bodhisattva suggested a religious temperament, his manner a lack of formal beliefs. His bedroom, very austere, had many books, including Homer and Lucretius, the Bible, Koran, Rig-Veda, Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, alongside works by Albert Schweitzer, Romain Rolland, Fridtjof Nansen, Jean Jaurès, mighty humanists.We disputed over a Taoist text: The Sage sees everything without looking, accomplishes everything without doing.

I objected that the Sage would not have benefited the White Rose or July Plot. He surprised and disarmed me by retreating, then assenting, though not altogether convincing me of his sincerity as he smiled, ‘Love–fifteen!’

His attitude displeased Marc-Henri, resolute atheist. ‘Possibly,’ Wilfrid replied to the other’s aggressive assertion that religion was criminal fraud, ‘God does not exist, being employed elsewhere on matters more urgent. Conceivably, being can have existence without life.’ Marc-Henri’s expression, and perhaps my own, sternly denied this;Wilfrid bowed his head in sham humility, then turned to me. ‘Certainly the gods were dilettantes, they built nothing, save Valhalla, itself a confession of weakness. They made an art of completing very little, were creatures only of promises, poses, atmosphere. As for God …’ he regarded Marc-Henri as he might a dog, much respected but needing a bone, ‘I met her only once, in her small flat at Malmaison.’

I laughed obediently. Marc-Henri did not. When we were alone, a rash of sunlight gave Wilfrid an effect of nonsensical transfiguration, glistening, taller, but vague, though when he spoke he was coolly unspiritual. ‘You and I, Erich, might share something with your namesake, Erik Satie, who once folded his umbrella during a thunderstorm, to save it from getting wet.’

This left me wondering whether this was complimentary, though I later made a weak joke at which Wilfrid rose and lowered his head in salutation, murmuring, ‘Love–thirty!’

Wilfrid would introduce me as his secretary, to the chagrin of Marc-Henri, who, though, usually included in the invitations, seldom obliged by accepting them. An actual secretary, Ursule, arrived each morning, to work with Wilfrid in what he called the shakes of routine. That he was involved in UN committees was divulged by his brief speech at an Elysée reception for Trygve Lie, Secretary-General, and Dr Julian Huxley, Unesco Director. A function not very useful, he told Marc-Henri, of his speech, though, I reflected, he might say the same of his death. One newspaper account included his reference to Jewish children, not those protégés of M. Bousquet but Roman, rounded up in buses for the train to Auschwitz and, passing St Peter’s, screaming for the Pope to save them.

I suspected that he might have had part in the idealist German Kreisau Circle and knew that he had had some dealings with von Moltke, Stauffenberg, Adam von Trott and perhaps Pastor Bonhöffer. His reticence perplexed but was also a relief, a sign that he was not really expecting me to emigrate to West Germany.

As if contradicting this, I found, left open and unavoidable, an architectural blueprint surmounted by a stylized flower and stamped White Rose. It delineated low, glassy buildings, uncluttered lines, of an international college, humanistic, independent, sited amongst woods and meadows near Munich, as memorial to those students, rather few, conspiring for peace, hanged for treason. For this project, Wilfrid admitting helping in a most minor capacity, extracting funds from German industrialists, some of whom had been indicted at Nuremburg for employing slave-labour, and indeed suffering an undignified but brief imprisonment, and were now back at their desks.

Undeniably I could expect work there, as teacher or interpreter but knew I would never apply. Its attractions were countered by images best symbolized not by obvious wartime atrocities but by the early German films I had been seeing: absorbing, haunting, with mountains beautiful but fearsome films, inducing images of suicide, uncanny fairgrounds, malignant puppets, a murderer of children chuckling in a quiet, respectable hotel, a slanted, empty street. No linden blossom.

Such thoughts were removed by Wilfrid announcing that, as always, in an insignificant, even microscopic way, he had been co-opted on to the committee arranging a September International Conference to discuss European cultural opportunities just possible now that the USSR might be expecting a regime fumbling and perhaps more liberal. ‘We must try to assume that the Cold War may diminish, though opposition can be anticipated from quarters mostly at odds with themselves.’

Marc-Henri was uninterested, nor was I much more concerned. ‘Conference’ rang dully. Munich, Wannsee, Teheran, Yalta … the League, the Axis. I foresaw disruption of our easy existence, feared being recruited to man a telephone, assess mail, run errands, endure asphyxiating speeches from a congress of fat Ten Per Centers, verbose, self-satisfied and wheedling for treacly compassion and hard cash.

Wilfrid could usually apprehend my feelings. ‘I agree …’ as though I had uttered a challenge, ‘that there will be danger of too much what the English like to call jabber.’

The Press was already buzzing. Malenkov proclaimed the Conference a further proof of Anglo-American aggression, and East European participation was forbidden. Einstein declared support, Winston Churchill was donating a painting for auction and had accepted honorary presidency, together with Albert Schweitzer, Pandit Nehru and Jean Monnet, prophet of United Europe.

None of this reassured me, and I was soothed only by Wilfrid driving me to a Longchamp tennis club, not sententious or high-minded but ostentatiously fashionable and frivolous. I was swiftly inserted into a foursome – sweaty, hard-hitting Americans and a Frenchman, a skilled though reckless volleyer. I performed well enough to be invited for a return match next week.

On another court Wilfrid was distinct in long, cool whites amid coloured shorts and hairy legs, his play an elegant repertoire of shots, not fierce but adroitly slanted, impishly witty in their timing as they wrong-footed opponents or left them reaching a shade too wide. Afterwards, exhilarated, hot and sticky from more muscular efforts, I found him sitting, as though he had yet to play, drinking champagne with several men and girls attired in the latest, and briefest, sporting modes.

‘Ah!’ Wilfrid rose to introduce me, then, with an air of possessing momentous and specialized information, said that I would grieve to hear that Miss Marlene Dietrich might have broken her leg. Showing considerable mournfulness, I lay back, very content, hearing only stray words. ‘Godard … Kinsey …’ and, drowsily, my glass assiduously refilled, watching swift white movements on green and white surfaces, balls rising, falling, in a scene from Renoir or Proust and promoting more international harmonies than any expensive, ill-tempered conference. Girls were dainty and evanes-cent as ballet and as much beyond reach.For this instant, no matter.

When the others departed, Wilfrid lingered. ‘Tolstoy, did he not, remarked about the impossibility of describing happiness. He forgot that he had already done so. You remember the young Rostovs’ evening with delightful and disreputable “Uncle”? The smell of fresh apples, the spontaneous laughter, the darkening countryside, the lamps, Natasha thinking of fairyland. And Uncle’s Cossack coat, his fat mistress.’ Upholding his shimmering glass, Wilfrid adopted a slight, foreign intonation and I at once heard Uncle, amongst fireflies, cherry brandy, honey, mirth. ‘This, you see, dear friends … is how I am ending my days. Death will drive up. That’s it. Come on. Nothing will remain. So why harm anyone?’

More normally, he remarked, ‘Uncle at his guitar …’ I was able to join with him, chanting under our breath:

Fetching water clear and sweet,

Stop, dear maiden, I entreat.

We were on pleasure island, indolent, dandyesque, complete. The bottle finished, Wilfrid made farewells, collected racquets, lifted a hand, irony discarded, the agreeable club member.

‘Tonight, Erich, there’s a concert. It might, do you think, round off the day.’

No gilded auditorium or perfumed salon but a murky tavern beneath Montmartre, where a chanteuse hoarsely intoned:

I, who was never young

Was once, they tell me, desirable.

5

Candelabras and buffets, shirt fronts, crimson sashes and rosettes, pearls, diamonds, bare shoulders and the latest coiffures. Young breasts, indistinct smiles, ambiguous pouts, metropolitan allusions. Galerie Maeght, an exhibition at Paul Facchetti’s, de Stäel’s suicide, some scandal about Céline uttered with bored languor, a glimpse of Cocteau, echoes of his purr that none of the battles of 1917 had been more violent than that over his ballet Parade, chatter about Camus and the lustrous Maria Casarès, then repetition of his epigram that he preferred Committed People to Committee Literature. His novel La Peste had cast a chilly glance at my own lack of commitment.

This quai d’Orsay soirée was honouring instigators – Swiss, French, German – of the Conférence du Monde. More sashes, tiaras, insignia, the front rank of the Légion: the deferential, the lofty, the polished, the creamy, some like distinguished hyenas, some like swans on dry land, some dignified as cranes. De Gaulle had been silent but Free French generals, Liberation heroes, were present, with the Banque Governor, the Ambassador to the UN, François Mauriac, Georges Pompidou, Jean Borotra, Malraux, Raymond Aron, Denis Saurat, André Maurois … rebelling the Protest Manifesto of Aragon, Joliot-Curie, Jean Genet, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Thorez, the secretary of the Trades Union Federation … indicting the Conference as a Zionist, anti-Soviet, anti-Peace conspiracy, in the pay of American capitalists and Swiss fascists who had profiteered by refusing Jewish refugees access to their own funds and, at Hitler’s behest, closing the frontier.

Laughter was noisy, if mechanical, out of bald heads, painted mouths, faces like confectionery, smart but fragile, endangered by emotions too lively. Many shared degrees of resemblance, cousinhood, like melodious puns, and exuding the nostalgic, lulling as hay. ‘The Countess did her best …’ ‘That year the harvest was so rich that …’ ‘When carriages arrived …’

Wilfrid had immediately attracted a circle, so that, thankfully, I could wander at will, surely unobserved. There was theme – the Conference – but presumably no story. Then, from within scintillas of the white-fronted, black-tailed and invisibly plumed, I overheard, sharp, and in this affluent mêlée unalluring as gripe to the guts, a reference to the Herr General.

I was still immobilized when one of this group, French, bearded, with the crisp white mane of a butler or senator in an American musical, detached himself and, formal but affable, nodding me into a windowrecess. I felt obscurely grateful. Less so, however, when he found it natural to speak to me in German, at which several turned around, candidly inquisitive or assuming unnatural impassivity.

‘You must forgive my intrusion, but I almost know you. I have seen you at La Gasconade with the good Wilfrid. You must be of very considerable help in his designs. Despite your youth, estimable, enviable, you must be one of us.’

Gratitude vanished down the drain. Contradicting the affability, the eyes within stained, waxy pouches were too shrewd, his words, each one counterfeit, warned me of a trap, a trace of espionage. He murmured his name, indistinct under the hubbub, resembling, improbably, ‘Dr Miracle’, one of those marginal theatrical characters appearing within scenes of stress or impasse. Whatever the stranger’s name and title, Dr Miracle might be appropriate, making him older than himself, a perennial ingredient in French politics, European plots, dangerous liaisons. He was offering me a cigar, which I hurriedly refused and pretended to be concerned with the star wine. He selected one for himself, from a gold case elaborately chased, with the studied care of a professional performer, then began his aria, pitched to the Herr General.

‘You appear interested in your noteworthy compatriot. I was honoured to shake his hand when he visited the Maginot Line in ’37. Complex times, so easily misunderstood. But in which we could not afford to lose. For him to be caught by monsters …’ Surprisingly, he changed course, chuckled, replaced his cigar, unlit, then pressed my arm, looking around as he might do at Longchamp races, inspecting likely winners, detecting losers, appraising his bets.

‘There’s old Marcelle, in this angle of vision double-headed, double-tongued, whispering venom into the Senegalese gentleman, if I choose the correct definition. In Vichy days, we called her the Diplomatic Bag, open to patriots and scum alike. Herr Ernst Jünger named her in his renowned collection of beetles …’ His sudden rapidity implied a remark oiled by frequent repetition, though he immediately slowed, in civilized restraint. ‘The Marshal treated her well, as he was intended to do. She was, you may not know, very useful to the Franco-German committee. None knew better the consequences of a Bolshevized Europe. De Gaulle cast her into outer darkness, but she may have had her revenge. He is to be imagined in a state of controlled despair and becoming his own desolate temple.’

I did not imagine this, and Marcelle resembled an over-painted, over-drinking hotel manageress, but he was scrutinizing me with some care, his white eyebrows seeming to me gruff; a waiter thankfully closed in with a bottle, I gulped, rather too hastily, and was relieved to see Wilfrid near me, bending forward, birdlike, to listen to the editor of Libération, hitherto cautious about the Conference, and though his back was towards me, half-concealed by long, fluttering gowns and twinkling evening bags, I knew that he would divine my predicament.

Dr Miracle, now illuminated, now shadowed, by the slow tide of guests and the stock chorus line of journalists, radio and television officials, and those the Americans were terming free-loaders, had become unconvincingly avuncular.

‘Erich …’ That he knew my name increased my suspicions. ‘If I may presume to call you so … our hosts, whose tastes and opinions I profoundly respect but cannot be said to share, tell me you are in part English. Well …’ he tapped me as he would a barometer, ‘it might still be wise not to discourse too loudly on that. Not to, as it were, boast.’

It was as if I had proposed to leap on to a chair, flourish the British flag, toast both Queen Elizabeths, but he ignored my demur. ‘The English, forgive me a thousand times, are inclined to belittle the efforts of others, and claim what is not rightly their own. They have contrived, for example, to present themselves as saviours of our continent, while concealing the disreputable and furtive. You may not have been told of the Orphans Affair.’ He looked at me, expecting and receiving my headshake. ‘In the early days of Occupation, under American pressure – I have never understood their need to gratify a specialized minority – Vichy issued certificates allowing a thousand children of Hebrew persuasion to sail to England, where their generous brethren had guaranteed support.’

Whether or not intentional, his voice and manner had silenced a number of the scented, ribboned, stately, now listening, several feigning not to. ‘But London forbade it, I cannot tell you why. The children did depart, France did not in all essentials require them, but not to sainted Albion but to Poland for what it was agreed to call resettlement. It is a grievous example of English adaptability. London’s flair for spiritual imperception befitting a nation built upon opportunism. England or, if you like Britain, indeed Great Britain, despite its fanfares and investments, in this light actually lost the war.’

The apostolic head and fragrant skin minutely shrivelled, his small laugh, apologetic to my Englishness, was almost vulgar. His grievous example, whether or not accurate, made the fringe listeners smile or nod; for me it was a considerable jolt, as if finding jazz in Napoleon’s notebook or hearing a Spanish baby drawl ‘psychosis’. And, once again, in this vivid summer, dead children spoilt the hour. The burnt crop of Europe. M. Bousquet satisfied with his masterpiece, and the desperate screams at sight of St Peter’s.

My spiritual perception might be meagre, but I wanted to dislodge a situation slippery and still watched. A plump hand, however, detached me, two rings glinting like winks. With growing acumen, I knew that Dr Miracle’s concern was not with the Herr General, not with children of any persuasion, very little with myself save with my supposed connection with the Conference. Were the new Soviet rulers allowing their pet author, Ilya Ehrenberg, to attend as reporter? Was Dulles expected? Would the gallant Mr Eden come? What precautions were being prepared against disorder and would troops be involved? He had lost his well-broached suavity, by now that of a croupier, and was questioning me like a police inspector.

Finally, his expression thinning, he desisted, shaking my hand, saying, not in German but in measured English as if to a backward child, ‘Very great pleasure. How very fortunate Wilfrid must be, having you beside him.’ Evocation of two survivors on a stricken battlefield. His handshake like the pourboire to a porter, or the virtuoso slice of lemon curled in a Dutch stilleben. As for sainted Albion, I saw the dome of St Paul’s, calm above the swirling flame and smoke of the Reichsmarschall’s gamble.

The shining evening had tired, and I was glad of Wilfrid’s signal to depart. Chin on hand, he heard my account of the Orphans Affair, looking at me as if preserving knowledge as yet inadvisable to discuss. This was uncharacteristic, for wickedness to children was one of the rare matters that upset him. His reaction to my verdict on Dr Miracle was also unsatisfactory.

‘We must accept, even be diverted by, the variousness of others. You were discerning enough to select a very individual specimen for your inspection. He was a Vichy minister, a leading opponent of the Reynaud–Churchill discussions about Anglo-French union. With Britain apparently defeated, Moscow about to fall, he became vehemently pro-German. You could have had sight of him in the Jünger film, standing with German generals and Laval at a Wehrmacht parade for Hitler’s birthday. He has not changed, has his own courage, not of the showy kind. Recently, he bribed his way free, from a government investigation into financial mischance. He shuns all publicity for using his millions to keep afloat a hospital ill-advised enough to allow me its chairmanship. In England, alas, he is forbidden to set foot. He will certainly, and very graciously, invite us to view his art collection. All in excellent taste and due to a family forced to sell at bargain prices, before deportation.’

A very unsatisfactory reference, I reflected.

Experience of Dr Miracle, renewed and discordant memories of the Herr General and the growing prominence of the September Conférence du Monde, together with sexual famine, was forcing me to keep watch like a fiction detective’s straight-man. I was one of those, like Count Pahlen’s confederates, who slink in shadows, taking notes, overhearing, stalking, but missing the grand climax. There would be evidence in plenty – Dr Miracle’s excellent artistic taste, revolution in Egypt, Adenauer’s visits to London and New York, the French presidential election – though evidence of what I could see little more than a muddle.

Meanwhile, the Conference, six weeks ahead, was inciting a turmoil of publicity quips, vengeful taunts, feuds scarcely unchanged since the Revolution and a morass of shifting allegiances akin to the testing time of Stalin’s death. Issuing a personal communiqué, Charles de Gaulle, without mentioning the Conference, foretold the demolition of what he called the grotesque Soviet System and demanded a general European effort to withstand American global ambitions. Jean-Paul Sartre replied that this was fascist foolery.

I now realized that many of Wilfrid’s associates belonged to another of M. Sartre’s targets, Toute Vie, not a political movement, more, apparently, an intellectual mood, shallow as an oyster, Marc-Henri instructed me, before boasting of his favourite and infuriating topic, progress with his latest girl. Did Wilfrid, I groaned, have any understanding of my real needs? Evidently not.

Toute Vie was further response to the feeble morale, political intellectual and financial corruption responsible for the French defeat in 1940, regarded by too many not as catastrophe but as opportunity for regeneration through suffering and self-purgation, with defeat of the Left and the suppression of anarchy. Anti-fascist, anti-communist, Toute Vie was attacked for alleged mysticism and its insistence on physical fitness indispensable for mental rigour and moral stability. Though it looked back to similar Renaissance cults, its appeal to athleticism and sport could, as Wilfrid rather ruefully admitted, be uncomfortably close to the Nazi ‘Strength Through Joy’ order and its Soviet replicas. Toute Vie was attracting many worker-priests, lately deprecated by the Vatican, together with youngish philosophers, teachers, publishers, physicians, constantly overcrowding our rooms and confirming English notion of jabber. Toute Vie, as conducted by these, was learned, dedicated, persuasive and tedious. At this, Wilfrid nodded without rancour, merely reflecting that the results of exciting rallies were usually deplorable, particularly in Paris, which often mistook excellent theatre for serious politics.

Whatever its deficiencies, the Conference would be no back-room gossip or kitchen-talk slogans, advocating universal hand-outs, Californian diet, deep breathing and the inspired negatives of Tao. Backed by UNESCO, the World Council of Churches, industrial combines, surely the CIA and perhaps the Pentagon, it had been lent the substantial, historically prestigious Pavillon Mazarin. Newspapers daily tabled support, promises, goodwill, from impersonal corporations and individuals whom Wilfrid described as being famous yet unknown.

His gift of Rilke’s poems had been valuable, but their constant exhortation to praise I found superfluous in this hectic atmosphere of big names and rowdy dissent. I could praise nothing, and, by now experienced in his ways, I regarded with rank suspicion his assurance that not only would I be helpful to him but would also have my fill of the ludicrous misunderstandings, heartfelt error and personal oddity unavoidable in any pretentious undertaking.

6

Wilfrid liked giving small dinner parties at home, usually inviting guests undemanding, friendly, and departing not too late. As refuge from Pavillon preparations, he proposed, ‘should you boys permit’ another dinner, but this time to entertain a personage too eminent to have noticed even the Conference. Lisette, traitor, beamed satisfaction. Marc-Henri was unexpectedly agreeable, though I winced like a flagellant. Only too likely was a Toute Vie enthusiast or, worse, Dr Miracle talking of Titian. It might not be beyond Wilfrid’s temperament, his quiet pleasure in surprising, to produce Dr Miracle’s demi-god, the Herr General, with gun in his pocket. More realistically, there would be a potentate offering me berth on a Brazilian estancia, a desk on an Oslo paper, an interview with Italian bankers or a Papal conclave. Thankfully, Konrad Adenauer, now in London, was unavailable and could not demand my opinion of Bonn’s economic policy, Wilfrid having commended my capacity for zealous research.

I reluctantly chose a suit and was displeased to find Marc-Henri had not relinquished his daytime flannels and cord jacket, his hair like a poorly trimmed hedge. I was less prepared for Wilfrid, in mauve, open-necked shirt and blazer. He suggested we wait in what he liked calling the Grand Salon, actually small and circular, lined with books and eighteenth-century Tuscan landscapes. His guest was late; I could only fantasize further about a Mother Superior with iron handshake and principles achingly inflexible or an Orthodox Archimandrite, fully robed, with glittering crucifix and hat tall as a spade.

The bell rang and, forestalling Lisette, Marc-Henri darted to admit the Presence. Incredibly, we heard a slight, unseen scuffle. I closed my eyes, flinching from the prospects to come, until Wilfrid spoke. ‘This …’ usually so scrupulously polite, he was almost indifferent, ‘is Suzie.’

A slim body with dancer’s neat poise, in black, somewhat scruffy slacks and lilac coat, dark eyes older than the sallow, sketchily triangular face pertly inspecting me from under short, dark, possibly dyed hair with spiky fringe. We were soon chatting about a movie, Barrault’s charm, Michel Simon’s crudeness, and drinking strong cocktails mixed by Marc-Henri, who treated Suzie like a friend whom he had once known too well to encourage my sudden hopes. Wilfrid oversaw us with the benevolent impartiality of a seasoned chairman.

At the table, candle flames quivering against glass, silver, roses, fruit, he, as always, drank sparingly but passed us wines with commendable regularity. Suzie’s animated talk and gestures roused Marc-Henri from lumpishness to joke about La Belle France needing the embrace of the Son of God, at odds with his agnosticism until I realized the latter was de Gaulle. Suzie was laughing, captious, anarchist in her sallies and political convictions or lack of them. Ignoring the Son of God, she told me, with accuracy perhaps only poetic, that she had once ridden in a circus. Wilfrid nodded like a connoisseur, I produced a joke that I remembered too late Marc-Henri had recently made. Embarrassed, reaching for the wine, though my glass was still full, I saw Wilfrid murmur to Suzie, who giggled immoderately, eyes widening at me, admiring or astonished, then, in the flimsy light, beautiful.

Wilfrid avoided my stare. ‘Like most of us Suzie is several people at once. Most of them very well worth acquaintance.’

Marc-Henri was seriously preoccupied with sea trout, not belying my suspicion that he might once have been rebuffed by the most carnal of Suzie’s selves. While she and Wilfrid pattered, I could do little except note her bright, birdy glances and laughs that ranged most of the scales; also her sharp, thinly covered breasts. Wilfrid, too, was virtuoso performer: unlikely to have been a circus artiste, he could have impersonated an indulgent confessor, elegant boulevardier, resourceful diplomat, reminding me of the Sphinx, before recollecting that its riddle had not been difficult.

Afterwards, Marc-Henri grunted then left us, and after depositing liqueurs and granting Suzie permission to smoke – her stained fingers detracted from scarlet nails – Wilfrid receded, pausing under an arch.

‘You both know what the Greeks called tyche. Chance. Fortune. In the blindness of chance, not fortune, I must leave you for a meeting vital though one of minimal importance. Suzie of course will remain until desiring to be driven home, for which preparations are in hand.’

Hard and moist at will, I was swamped by excess of metaphor, swooping over rainbow islands, wine-dark seas, perilous whirlpools. She was agile nixie, knee-deep in froth, trainee Helen, creature of wilful, excitable Paris, decidedly no virgin, scornful of my inexperience. Mother would have judged her Bad Taste or, if in extreme impatience, a Light Woman.

In our first tourney, that first evening, we probed, parried, with jokes, butterfly repartee. Thenceforward, Wilfrid, immersed in Conference details, never directly alluding to her, generously provided opportunities. ‘They’ve sent me tickets for the Jouvet. I cannot attend but maybe …’

Suzie’s incessant smoking betrayed nervousness contradicted by her bold eyes and talk. I was not yet risking my stock northern repertoire: pale summer Priata Beach, gold topping a mast, wild geese outstretched against bruised skies, Pahlen’s expressionless face, wild strawberries, Old Men of the Earth, in Forest, the girl who ran, the Lights, billowing, crystalline, electric. Of not quite assessable age, young, but a femme du monde, she would dismiss these as schoolboy jottings, les petits riens, reducing me to a monkish novice.

We quarrelled over nothings. I hated rain and darkness in movies, she enjoyed both. My greed for fruit she found objectionable, as I did her cigarettes. She thought Michèle Morgan insipid; to me, she was marvellous. Such passages were fire to the spirit, the gift of honeymoon before marriage.

With her, the Conference could be forgotten. Life was too short for ideals. We met in small cafés, all posters and tobacco haze, in Jardin des Plantes under low clouds, in almost empty parks; we sat in remote bars engulfed in the skirmish of muted trumpets, helter-skelter clarinets, erratic saxophones. Parting, we ceremoniously shook hands, though earlier we might have embraced, spontaneously, under a railway arch, applauded by the drop-outs. We joined in rapture at sunlight strewn over the Seine, a kingfisher flashing through the Bois, a tramp in perfect black bow-tie and disgusting blouse. Each hour together was a craze, to be charted, pondered, re-examined like a graph.

I was shy of inviting her to the apartment, for Marc-Henri’s soggy grin, Wilfrid’s particular humour, Lisette’s knowingness. She had not yet mentioned her own, somewhere in an outer Section, though possibly awaiting me to suggest it. Tactics advised delay, sharpening appetite, prolonging the delicious paraphernalia of seduction, though I felt uncertain who would be seducer. Timing was all, and I watched for the signal, a matelot on the shore seeking the white sail. I was unable to dispel bespoke comparisons, the fantasia of breasts, buttocks, small fuzz – was that also dyed? – while I imagined her posing, in gleeful parody, one hand at her breasts, the other guarding or jabbing her vagina, while she contemplated a vase, a painting, and looked solemn as a nun. I was inhabiting a thriller, defying tyche, sha, Tao, Wilfrid’s packet of spells.

Seldom exquisite, in dark-green, tilted student’s cap, she was a poem inadequately translated but retaining the substance, true line, swing. Part of the volatile streets, we hinged our day on Let’s, like a Hans-in-Luck rhyme. Let’s go movie, go shop, go Metro, go drink. Each corner disclosed some trouvé – a concierge like a pile of warm beef, repellent as Baba Yaga, an old gentleman caressing a doll, a blind beggar at Saint-Martin happily, though unobtrusively, reading Paris-Soir. In fashion, she usually wore dark glasses, accenting veiled purposes, which, like her wonder-why exclamations, sudden touch, lowered voice, sparked a possibility glinting like a coin on a rug. She drew life, vigour from Hollywood stars – Lancaster, Curtis, Sinatra, Peck – and she murmured ‘Bogart’ like a ‘yes’ at an altar. Instinctively I left her the pas, overlooking her inconsistencies. One day she desired a trip to Brittany. I mapped a route, but she looked puzzled, then asked, expressionless, whether I realized that Kirk Douglas was a Polish Jew. She mentioned Southern Spite, which, left undefined, sounded ugly. Remembering a kestrel high above the Manor stables, I ventured love for the North, but her frown implied a shape even worse than Southern Spite. Bardot she scorned as a Lard Cauliflower. Sunflowers were haughty, daisies childish, peonies horrid.

Constantly under her inspection, I was conscious of new facial resources: careless, stricken, insouciant, would-be mysterious, none of which she appeared to notice, chasing her own quick chatter. Did I realize … ? Could I not see … ? Surely … ?

She shrugged away Mon Général, calling him a blind oculist on cracked sticks, almost as pitiful as Bardot. The Conference was a publishers’ racket. Reading little, she thought of Camus only as an Algerian goalkeeper. Americans she admired, even a few outside Hollywood. ‘They rush through. Full-throated.’ An embargo was placed on my historical anecdotes, and my nose for street names deplored. Place du Colonel-Fabien, rue Descartes, rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. ‘Mouldy things. Forget them, please.’ They were insignificant as McCarthy, Cold War, Reconstruction, the Conference, my concern for them perverse.

Despite my exasperation, this somehow made her droll, even witty. When I referred to the war, she mischievously demanded, ‘Who won?’, the question later sounding less silly than I had thought. I dared not risk her chortle at the White Rose or her bemused incredulity, real or adopted, at my pilgrimage to the Conciergerie. I desisted from asking her to traipse through Père Lachaise in reverence to mouldy things: Maupassant, Baudelaire, Wilde. She insisted that recent weather forecasts were politically coded: disturbance over Biscay meant detection of a nuclear submarine, thundery rain, the expectation of riots. Her eyes widened within circles of mascara. I must realize …

For myself, a chrysalis prepared for marvellous change, she was professionally unexceptional, assisting some very junior movie executive, assisting, as it were, the assistant, seeking bit parts, rewarded with an occasional crowd scene or line of dialogue. Like most of us, she wanted more. More money, more adventure, more applause. I would have preferred her to have a career less raffish and open to plunder: her invitations from unnamed producers, jobless directors, hungry script-writers aggrieved me like Wilfrid’s telephonists treating him like a doctor on call. She might be laid nightly, over-drinking, over-dancing, under-dressing, stroking the hairy cheeks of the ass-headed or straggled and pierced by a troll eager for more. ‘Bon appetit,’ she would say, insinuating depraved pleasure. ‘Nous les gosses.’

Unaffected by our disdain, Conference arrangements were being finalized. Lord Russell had been voted into the shared presidency; something of a prima donna, he then resigned, but, to a blast of publicity, recanted. Good wishes came from Robert Schuman, former premier, resistance leader, whose Plan had internationalized West European coal, iron, steel: from Willi Brandt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, Aldous Huxley, André Malraux. Opponents howled that Malraux, writer, explorer, art critic, film-maker, Gaullist, was class traitor. Humanité reiterated the accusation of anti-Soviet conspiracy and proposed a Peace Rally in Cairo, where revolution had destroyed the monarchy, republican generals anxious for support from both Washington and Moscow, already disputing with London over the Canal Zone. An article, unsigned, but attributed to Simone de Beauvoir, alleged American Zionist hopes of sabotaging the only realistic instrument of peace, the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact. A transport strike was threatened. ‘Dollar Princess’ was splashed on Martha Gellhorn’s car; a neo-fascist royalist sheet sneered that the Conference was sullied by pacifists, Freemasons, Jews, failed Olympic athletes and tennis players from a fetid nest miscalling itself Toute Vie. Wilfrid, like others, received threats, one on fragrant, crinkling paper ennobled with crossed swords, anonymously accused him of being subsidized by Mexico. This was a bizarre addition to references overheard at parties, theatres or seen in gossip columns: he had been observed in Rome, with Via Margutta artists, had lectured at the American University, Beirut, once, hugely smiling, had been mistaken for a maharajah in Lausanne.

How had Suzie first met him? Shaded by a marble cascading Neptune, she flicked my hand, slightly husky against the splash, her faintly yellow face half concealed by the smoked, ovalled glasses.

‘What matter? He just appeared beside me in the Tuileries. I was learning a part. Actually, half a line. “Your hat, monsieur …”’ Her giggle was unmelodious, she stood, legs apart, smiling up at me as if delivering the hat and expecting too many francs. ‘Almost no one was around. He seemed to have pushed away the air to continue a talk. With anyone else … Well, men! I see straight, my fine Erich, I don’t miss a horse in the yard. Most just want my rear end. But he was like a family lawyer you see in ancient plays, who settles the will, finds the papers, keeps everyone to the final curtain. Though’ – her voice went brittle as she shrugged – ‘I’ve lost family. Stupidity … Anyway, he made some remark about a vanished palace, but, quite soon, very strange, he strolled away, asking for nothing. Yet, next week I was back, counting tulips, and, just imagine, he was there, not near me, actually walking away. I had to run after him. He was very polite, not exactly deferential but never almighty or sniffy. And, do you know, he did me a conjuring trick. He told me I was being considered for a role, in the new Gabin. Yet, think of it, I didn’t remember telling him anything! Certainly not about work. But that very evening, God in Heaven, out of oblivion the offer came. Only sitting at a desk and saying the Gabin character was busy. But Gabin himself, at close quarters smaller than I had expected …’

Resenting her in such quarters, I did not listen until, grasping my arm, she moved us away. Glasses removed, her eyes were amused. ‘I don’t see Wilfrid often. Once he took me and another girl to a gallery. Très aristo. I behaved not too well, said the stuff, sculptures, had insufficient bone. How awful!’ Her artificial shudder could have been rehearsal for Gabin, her hands spread like a fan. ‘The nudes, birds, abstracts. The sculptor, on the card, was called Gaxotte. But, tell you what, I thought, while not quite believing, that Wilfrid had done them himself.’

I hurried alone to the gallery, in a fashionable area, but the catalogue only revealed that Gaxotte had exhibited abroad and lived in France. The curator refused to divulge more. Spare, pale grey, taut and angular, heads blank, the exhibits had some, if inconclusive, resemblance to Wilfrid’s collection but nothing further. He remained impossible to question, iconic, motionless as if at prayer, surveying the microscopic but exact tints of a Bokharan miniature or a Brancusi bird, cut smooth without blandness, poised in calm exposition of line, alternately curved and straight, still, yet about to tremble into flight, the head imperious yet unearthly.

An article in Les Temps modernes, exalting the roman novelle had thumb-nosed the classic novels with their perpetual ‘and then … and then …’, but, for that summer, my days were just that: and then. Each day with Suzie was renewal, a birthday. In rue de Rivoli, under lingering sunset and long shadows, she brattishly stuck tongue out, not at Brancusi but at a plaster Jeanne d’Arc in a Maison Doré window, then lewdly gesticulated at a poster cartoon of de Gaulle, as Wild Man of Martinique. Why Martinique? She responded as if to the witless. ‘Explanations don’t explain.’ Flushed, oddly vindictive. ‘I’ll turn up to laugh at his funeral.’

Despite her rapture at brilliant scarves, flamboyant shirts and the hot, powerfully lit studios, she insisted on avoiding the crowded and voguish – Bar Meraude, Tournon – for dim Left Bank places where youths with frilled cuffs, swollen rings, string ties, glowered at serious students, lounged over empty cups, eyed ageing women with little-girl voices; or cellar pit reeking with fumes, for easy tunes and dances, myself the slower, less inventive. She suspected I lived in unwholesome luxury and was, I thought, mocking, attempting to please me, yet securing her escape-routes. I had no ready-made analysis; she was in and out of reality, like my toys’ escapades while I slept in the Turret. Girls wove life differently, sometimes abruptly aged.

Once she darted, as if alarmed, into a sepulchral bouquiniste in rue de Seine, hurriedly rummaging, head cocked, mouth pursed amongst embroidered stools, cracked busts, chess-sets, snuff-boxes, yellowing prints that Mirabeau could have seen. First charming, then dismaying the patronne, she purchased nothing, refusing my offer of a jade dragon she particularly liked, then pouting at my refusal to buy for Wilfrid a Maltravé harp with all strings missing. She ridiculed my interest in a waxen bouquet under a glass dome, old, yet fresh as if just delivered to some finely laundered hand. Hoch die Kaiserin. Vive l’Impératrice. We surged into hilarity at hearing of a Pittsburgh magnate received in audience at the Vatican and wondering whether to tip the Pope; at excavations in the Saint-Anne-des-Bois nunnery producing a quorum of baby bones; at the gypsy gaoled for impersonating Victor Mature and subscribing his profits to a group demanding unilateral French disarmament; a parrot outside Saint-Sulpice squawking ‘Money Talks’. Our frictions still thrilled. A swift red tinge in the Bois, a fox; Certainly not. She stamped. ‘You never agree. You’re Prussian, know nothing of pain. No, not Prussian. You are …’ her small face tightened, as if to spit, I brace myself for the knock-out, ‘English!’ Then caressing me, not repentant but instantly forgetting. But once, following mirth at a woman arguing with a dog, she clenched hands, muttering in coarse, unidentifiable patois. ‘I’ve a right to be present,’ glaring at me but surely accusing someone else. ‘I don’t need certificate for breathing. It’s you that’s bad breath.’

The nearer one approaches, the more the other recedes, at times, goaded by her talkative reticences; I remembered a message from one of Wilfrid’s thick books, that, approaching a woman, you should not forget the whip. An approach to Suzie best left unstated.

Bed hovered above our jaunty duels, an instrument waiting to be played. My body stung, but she was reshaping me. I was finding capacities for outright laughs, for showing emotion, for turning shoulder to the violent, suffering past. Her gibes enlivened.

‘Like German philosophers …’ she named none, ‘you’re too slow. That’s not incurable.’ Then glimmered with caustic amusement. ‘Bon appetit when you sharpen your crayon.’ Tantalizing in ambiguity, enclosing my literary hopes, which I exaggerated with her, my dislike of ‘commitment’, my sexual awkwardness. Foreheads touching, hands brushing, a glance reproachful or affectionate was part of a campaign of mined terrain, camouflaged marsh, sunken roads, deceptive salience, misread maps, injudicious feints, raids that might explosively recoil. Many battles are fought from mistaken premises, as though, by gnawing a book, a dog learns to read Nietzsche.

Marc-Henri, guessing more than was comfortable, advised with swarthy sans-culotte animality, his glibness hinting at unwholesome practices. ‘You should never let them know you’re satisfied, expect their gratitude, admit needing pity.’

August closed in blue heat. Wilfrid, digressing from the Conference, a fortnight ahead, suggested that, just possibly, I might care to accompany him to Bonn. ‘A few matters to dispose of. Not of the first importance, conforming to the Spanish proverb that cash in the pocket is a good Catholic. You might care to meet …’ Adenauer, no doubt, Otto John, Willi Brandt. In post-masturbation ennui I reflected that the excursion would cancel several dates elsewhere and mumbled neither assent nor refusal, though his appreciative smile intimated that he accepted the latter. Shamed by his acknowledgement of the superior claims of my own business, I at once – And then - wished to retract, but, waiving all claims, he had already smiled himself away. That he might genuinely need my company did not then occur to me. I preferred to be shrinking from his anxiety to procure me some post in the Allied Administration, a UN commission, a chance to trail some ex-Nazi aspirant to high office or, such was his taste, that I should apply for a bishopric.

Self-accusations of lethargy, shirking, lack of being, nagged like a cyst. Once, in a sort of cabin fever, I had craved to pursue the girl who ran, ride with the Herr General to feast with the Reichsmarschall, tramp the Black Forest seeking Erl-King or slim huntress. This had shrunk to hopes of a pert French girl opening her legs. On Wilfrid’s departure, with Paris seething with Conference anticipations and discord, I was splayed with images of foreboding. A withered hand upheld at crossroads, tests set by dwarf with a secret name, an insignificant quest, a bladed wind against which I was powerless to struggle. A foreboding as though dredged from wayward childhood reading and displaying, hung over Paris, the black hood and yellow claws of an Exterminating Angel.

7

Severely suited prominentes moved in informal measures with Special Correspondents, Academicians, Toute Vie initiates, embassy officials, preparing to nudge the future. Emblems shone – a starry French African robe, a green turban – bows and handshakes were being exchanged, affable demeanours were tinged with some complacency. The spectacle swelled to a champagne bubble, voices almost sang, in diffusions of delicate pink and flecked-gold light beneath a lofty Renaissance ceiling enscrolled with a further Conference, naked celestials languidly conversing at a forest pool, while putti dodged between roseate clouds. In contrast, on a green marble pillar, discreetly illuminated, presided a blown-up portrait of a head: bald crown, grooved face narrowing towards the chin, powerful eyes. Ernst Wiechert, recently dead, whose home had, notoriously, been plundered by French occupation troops in Germany. East Prussian schoolteacher and famed novelist, much admired by Wilfrid, Iron Cross veteran, sent to Buchenwald for treason, he had once urged massed students, watched by Himmler himself, to unite in global fellowship, respect for truth, individual freedom, an imagination free of past angers.

Amongst the students could have been the Scholl brother and sister, of the White Rose. To Himmler’s visible fury, Wiechert confessed that he saw some good in his enemies, blemishes in his friends. Austere, stubborn, his etherealized presence sanctioned whatever might come.

From outside, commotion, now a heaving growl, now a single outcry. That morning Humanité had red headlines accusing the Conference as cat’s paw of the Pentagon and CIA. An article by Sartre ‘in the spirit of the Resistance’ had declared that by being anti-revolution the Conference must be anti-life, was today countered by another, signed ‘AC’, identified as Camus, comparing Sartre’s resistance to the Occupation to the tail-wag of a mouse. The transport strike had not occurred, though rumours of bombs and raucous demonstrations caused the police to line the forecourt. Picasso’s communist Dove of Peace was pasted on walls, memorials, doors. The week had pulsed with threats and recriminations. Lifts, stairs, corridors were guarded by police, un-uniformed hirelings, vigilantes. An envelope on the pavement could contain powder, church bells be a tocsin.

Marc-Henri, throughout, was dourly unconcerned. ‘Sensible fellow,’ Wilfrid said, though I, too, remained much the same.

Wilfrid had departed before breakfast, so I left unaccompanied. Fearing the disorders, I would have carried a knobbed stick but for anticipation of an ironic lift of his eyebrow and offer of an escort with cannon.

The immediate streets were dense with police, attempted pickets, rival partisans. Sliding through shaken fists, hoots, stamping, I was soon rather pompously exhilarated, as though at last under fire. Banners jostled, a Red wind: Yanks Go Home, Peace Without Dollars, Jerusalem for the Arabs. I sniffed history from faces swollen and enflamed as Marat’s, stampedes from the old Revolutionary Sections – Saint-Antoine, Faubourg Saint-Monceau – howls for the Republic of Equals, a whiff from Les Halles pungent as the Chicago stockyards. Braced by the uproar, I hoped I was proud, composed, subtly within great events. Wedged in one street, agitators of the Right-wing UDCA, pledged against Marxist Jews and traitors, were waving placards agitating against internationalism and demanding the rights of small shopkeepers in a purified France. Such crowds gave fierce tonic to the loves and hatreds jostling within the giant skull of Europe, my sudden fervour delighting in such phrases.

Not as descendent of Pahlen, scarcely as Resistance legionary, but as ‘secretary’, I had place amongst notables. Most wore name badges. Martin Büber, Zionist and philosopher, small, spectacled; the American author, Lionel Trilling, tall, elegant, diffidently smiling above a pale green bow-tie: Rudolf Augstein, editor of Der Spiegel, which he called ‘the assault battery of Democracy’, and who had been wounded on the Eastern Front. A Canadian bishop, Toute Vie publicist, promised me a ticket for his Liberal Pacificism lecture. The Gandhist Socialist, Mr J. Narayan, grinned in abstruse complicity, perhaps mistaking me for a hunger-marcher. His mauve, silk jacket, off-white trousers and jewelled fly-whisk, contrasting some tail-coats and sashes, gave him an endearing clownishness.

Surrounded by top journalists, Golda Meier, Israeli delegate, was demanding water as if declaring war on Egypt. Less vehement, twice as tall, was the Norwegian architect, Odd Nansen, son of Fridtjof, whom Gorky had once called the Conscience of Europe: he had dismissed the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 as a futile attempt to restore a dead era and declared that the difficult takes a little while to accomplish, the impossible a little longer. The son had suffered Sachsenhausen concentration camp as hostage for King Haakon. Watched by two polished Orientals, impersonal as fish, he was discussing with a Swedish surgeon, cousin of Björn Prutz, who, in London, 1940, was reputed to have discussed peace terms with ministers behind Churchill’s back.

I overheard that Hans Mayer, East German Marxist, had been seen, thus in defiance of his government. Golo Mann, historian, son of Thomas, was being photographed with Gérard Philipe, anxious, very intent, with the pout he had adopted for Caligula, in Camus’ play. Flashlights were incessant, netting me as if I were being sought by makers of realms, alongside such guardians of culture as Robert Antelme, husband of Marguerite Duras, whose novels Wilfrid recommended. Once a slave in Buchenwald and Gandersheim, Antelme had sadly confessed his joyful relief when executioners overlooked him and selected a comrade.

Standing by the long white table stacked with bottles was the Greek scholar and politician, Michail Stasinopoulos, looking puzzled that the photographers had not yet recognized him. In a later picture I was seen as if raising a fist at him, though actually passing him a plate. André Malraux was encircled by women in smart Italian trouser-suits, though more concerned with a lofty, glowing, untidy English poet, Mr Spender, beside whom he looked much smaller than his publicity pictures. He was lively, dark hair loose over features tallowy, lined, sharp at the chin and frequently twitching as if at a fly. He appeared troubled by his breathing, almost in pain, constantly flicking his nose. His eyes, large, shadowy, yet, seen closer, streaked with red, looked past his companion and the women as if inspecting several others simultaneously. When the Englishman hesitantly began some response, Malraux, whose thoughts filled three continents, from a small green bag selected a sugar lump with some care, though surely all were identical. I thought he might be about to place it into the other’s wide mouth but, shaking his head, he replaced it.

Knowing of Wilfrid’s interest in Malraux and friendship with Spender, I moved closer through the noisy, absorbed crowd, at an angle shielding me from their notice, though in another photograph, in the morrow’s Matin, they appeared to be awaiting my verdict on a momentous dilemma. A black gentleman in unfamiliar uniform joined them, hands in continuous motion as if tying a parcel. Nervy, Malraux smoked constantly, speaking so fast that I heard only fragments. ‘A failure … Palmyra … Aurelian … AD 70 … Quattrocento.’ Wilfrid had respected his work on Goya and his Spanish Civil War movie, though distrusting his Arabian escapades and intimacy with Lawrence, Prince of Mecca. His Resistance exploits were still being belittled for alleged thefts of Cambodian art treasures and his desertion of the Left for his hero, de Gaulle.

Near me, I saw, bearded, fair-headed, thickly glassed and, at first sight, nondescript, Primo Levi, Italian partisan, poet, linguist, industrial chemist, friendly yet seeming to reserve space to repel the unwanted. He actually spoke to me, asking if I possessed ‘what was wanted’. And that? ‘A good memory.’ Curiously eager, he asked about my parents, hopes and about Estonia. My replies won approval and, eyes brightening, reaching to me beneath the high forehead, he touched my elbow. ‘Don’t forget. Always remember.’ He himself seemed tightly suppressing emotions or recollections, and I remembered that a German lady once, very grandly, enquired where he had acquired such excellent German. ‘At Auschwitz,’ touching his arm, marked 174517.

He had gone but had braced my self-confidence, convincing me that I was on the outskirts of history, as I had been as a boy watching a Rathaus ball, listening to the Herr General talk of Count Bernadotte, the Reichsmarschall, the Gutter King or standing to attention beneath Pahlen’s portraits. Scarcely Talleyrand at Vienna, I might pass as delegate of a vanished republic. Malraux’s rosette gleamed like a medal, his dark suit became battle dress, momentarily I was with him low-flying over Franco’s armies or escaping a Nazi prison camp. Such a man could be boxing champion, river-boat card-sharper, Freikorps captain, confidante, then righteous betrayer, of a Napoleon.

I was within a giant glass paperweight, which, reversed, transforms summer to snow storm. In this great mansion, Fouché, hiding from Robespierre, had conferred for an instant with Barras, the latter terrified for his mistress’s life, and from such brief moments came Thermidor, Hagen’s curse upon power. Vast tasselled curtains, giant chandelier, grandiose paintings, ornate mouldings of bacchantes and centaurs, unperturbed by the scowls and hatreds without, would outlast us all, save, perhaps, an immemorial Dr Miracle, who, barely seen, like Primo Levi, forgets nothing.

Followed by television cameras we were shuffling into the ballroom, hung with old gold-and-crimson tapestries. On the orchestra dais, richly caparisoned, the committee was already seated, Wilfrid inconspicuous at one end. The rest of us found chairs in the long, curved rows beneath, and, perhaps in kindness, Trilling seated himself beside me, for which I was almost tearfully grateful. ‘They say,’ his voice was soft but with each word distinct, pointed, ‘that we can expect, by my standards, an unusually fine dinner. Before that …’ His shrug was rueful, in civilized good-humoured forbearance. Then, as if reminding me, he indicated people of whom I had never heard – Nathalie Sarrault, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot … I was reassured when he confessed his unfamiliarity with Paris. ‘I hope you can tell me …’

His preliminary shrug was justified. The morning’s chairman, a Brazilian novelist, bright yellow, with few hairs, plenty of stomach, read telegrams, wholesome but repetitive. Truman, de Gaspari, Nehru, Monnet; from Attlee, Hannah Arendt and Churchill, who aroused the loudest acclaim. Then from the UN Secretary General and a recorded sermon from Thomas Mann, during which Malraux, a row ahead, sat with arms sternly folded. Now an American citizen, Mann reminded us of the traditional values and value of Old Germany. This elicited much approval, save from Malraux. Not so the congratulations from Jung, received in unpleasant silence. Even I remembered his pre-war salute to the SS, as a knightly caste, spiritual élite, outriders of the New Order and who had mocked Stauffenberg and the July Plotters as lions quarrelling over a hunk of raw meat. The vision of them gasping and twitching on the rope was a frozen glance from the unspeakable.

The chairman was at last urging us to guarantee the rehabilitation of Europe, the simple hand clasp, he ventured to believe against any opposition, was the only authentic passport. On this, a resolution was accepted, not quite unanimously, to dispatch a message of friendship to the Kremlin.

The high, scarlet-pelmeted windows could have been permanently glued, against Jacobins, Communards, Paris in bad temper, the warmth thickened by smokers. Already resisting drowsiness, I saw Wilfrid far away, his studied sympathetic assent to a rigmarole of platitudes.

From the floor – no one ascended the dais – a German gentleman in beige, all correct lines and smart half-seen handkerchief, had risen, Trilling leaning back in slightly incredulous distaste.

Despite his opulent suit, the speaker was nervous, apprehensive, plaintive, his face like frayed rubber, drooping sideways, his hands as if confused by gloves slipped on to the wrong fingers, while he began in low, somewhat clammy French, the accent correct but as though he did not wholly understand the meaning of the words.

‘Yes. In war, we Germans submitted to pressure but were determined, adamant, that, if we must bend, we would not break. In the spirit of the martyred Gandhi, we submitted but refused inner allegiance.’

He hesitated at a flutter of unease, during which Trilling, not lowering his voice, informed me that Herr Doktor Otto Flake was a Bavarian novelist, blatant supporter of the Hitler–Stalin Pact as the triumph of generosity, who had published substantially, profitably, throughout the regime and who had, in murky circumstances, been acquitted by a de-Nazification court.

‘Yes, we maintained our dignity and what our people call honour, by refusing to beg for the prizes offered in safe centres, in neutral lands. We were forced to join the barbarous Party House of Culture, but …’ he held the word like a dangerous grenade, ‘we held our souls tight, the true culture represented in this hall today. The inner freedom instanced by Kepler, by Hölderlin. We owed it to Germany to survive at any cost, independent of politics. The only true politics is in the spirit. Our true Führer was Goethe. Some of us called our beliefs Internal Emigration.’

The silence, that of subdued tensions, enabled us to hear, more clearly, the seething menace on the streets, ominous as swords clashing on shields, dreaded by emperors. Unmistakable was the clatter of mounted police, then another silence, the Bavarian voice now louder, more satisfied, ignoring Trilling’s interjection, quiet but startling, ‘Cultural scoundrel!’ Heads turned, Malraux nodded approval, and coughs and mutters forced Dr Flake to sit down. Relief was provided by a recording from an African poet, his ‘Ode to the Unnoticed’.

Then another German, unrhetorical but with controlled passion. ‘We knew what was happening and we did nothing. That was our Internal Emigration. Our eyes were open, our skins shuddered and we waited for brutes to tell us our next move. Internal Emigration! Choice words for those seeking to swim on dry land, get drunk from empty tankards, fortify themselves with words. All words published under the Third Reich stink. One should never touch them.’

Hands twittered and thrust, like Bourse dealers; some were clapping. Mr Spender, beside Malraux, head glistening like Parsifal, was pink with approval. Above us, Wilfrid was impassive, others worried or undecided, until Martha Gellhorn, in a few staccato, invigorating sentences, pleaded not for tolerance, mysticism, eloquence but alertness and analysis. A French existentialist academic, at a nod from the bulky commanding Brazilian, demanded that Europe should seek Freedom: from idolatory, weak notions of self, history, the myth of the unconscious. ‘I ask for the Essence,’ he concluded, though none of us could stand up and supply it.

These mouthings could not be for what Wilfrid had laboured, but that he himself, with his aversion to oratory, would address us I doubted. The Algerian deputy was protesting against colonialism, with a flair for nineteenth-century abusive phrases, but afterwards the verbal criss-cross was as tepid as Herr Flake’s soul-movements or Rising Tide. Another resolution was acclaimed, another postponed. An Iranian quoted Voltaire emphatically but, Trilling murmured, inaccurately. Expectations of Wilfrid’s protégé, François Bedarika, Catholic historian and Maquis fighter, were disappointed. Some saint must soon assure us that American racialism was journalistic propaganda, that Show Trials, Purges, the Pact, had never occurred, the Baltic states had never existed. Even the Revolution choked itself on ideals.

At the buffet interval, on the lawns secluded from the uproar of the barricades, now, apparently, in retreat, Trilling left me, to join a more fervid debate amongst French and Poles, about the moral validity of Americans executing Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for atomic espionage and treachery. I could not hear Trilling’s opinion but guessed him liberal almost to excess, while a grey-haired, grey-suited man smiled shyly, before speaking to me in English. ‘I am so glad to meet you at last. I hope the Atlantic crossing did not upset. But you probably flew with His Grace.’ His plump face was vague at the edges, the smile as if pinned to settle the slack mouth. He added, ‘When you are back home, be so kind as to tell Miss Bette Davis that she is still what, in once-popular parlance, they called the tops.’ I refrained from telling him Davis’s alleged assessment of a rival, that she was the original Good Time Had by All.

Despite the general clamour, there was unmistakable listlessness and discontent. Nehru was in Delhi, Churchill in Morocco, Russell had been blown off course by a tantrum and was now sitting down in Trafalgar Square to delay the Bomb. Signor Levi was departing, though pausing to shake hands with me, excusing himself by his horror of public speaking. The eyes, behind spectacles, though confiding, were also shrewd. ‘Don’t forget,’ he repeated, almost whispering.

Trilling rejoined me for the afternoon session which began with a torrent of accusations from an exiled Polish painter, scorched face, hair like a black biretta, French like a grating file. Soviet generals had invited sixteen Polish leaders to confer with Marshal Zhukov; they complied and were shot. British generals had done likewise in Carinthia, betraying Russian and Serb anti-Bolsheviks to Stalin and Tito. Appeasement, he told us, was muck and sewage, sewage and muck. We should use scythes, we should use bullets, in extremity we should use … But loudening discomfort blocked out the last horror. We were, despite his outcry, appeased by an Italian actress in a dark velvet pyramid-shaped hat topped with blue aigrette. ‘Such sentiments’ – she spread hands – ‘such intolerance …’ her thick brows rose almost into the hat. She spoke of the onus of new circumstance, the dilemmas of crisis, the need to forget history, true or false. Listeners wavered between politely applauding sincerity and shrugging at operatics.

A diminutive Dutch lady had replaced the Brazilian chairman, and, the proceedings on the verge of lapsing into fuggy void, she signalled to a stocky Belgian ex-general, ‘The Hero of Gravelines’, ex-minister, whose savage temper was reputed to have helped lose King Leopold his throne. Unprepossessing as Southern Spite, he lectured us, reinforcing his reputation, rasping, threatening. Before he finished, it was as though the ‘Radetsky March’ had blown through us.

‘Retribution is sanctioned by religion but again and yet again is rejected as disgraceful, uncivilized. But, on behalf of millions, I maintain that, as Nuremburg proved, it can be necessary as bread, medicine, wine. It is tribute to the dead, the shattered and bruised. It restores moral balance, totality …’

He was grimacing as if about to chuckle, his thick moustache a caricaturist’s prize, his hands like a schoolmaster’s, raised against a class incorrigibly stupid. ‘The Crucifixion, bloody and torturing, was revenge, upon Evil, Tradition, Human Nature itself. My message, then? This. That whoever declares himself detached, unprejudiced, impartial, I fear as I fear smallpox.’

I would have liked to have heard Levi’s response. Though the Belgian was forced to his seat by unanimous dissent, Wilfrid shaking his head, Spender protesting, Trilling disapproving, I did not myself feel impartial towards those Russians or Germans, who had eliminated my family.

Though another had been granted the right, Odd Nansen was already speaking, compelled by feelings stoked by the Hero of Gravelines. Very tall, so stiff that, bending, he might crack, very noisily, he was using a clumsy but powerful French, surprising from his mournful, perspiring, spaniel-like face, and as if stubbornly breasting intractable waves. In mounting agitation, he constantly changed stance, anxious to reach all parts of the ballroom, even the tapestries, insignia of the deposed and lost.

‘I, too, am concerned with Retribution. In the camps I saw it. Day after day.’ This received a cheer, for Day After Day was the title of his recently published narrative of captivity. ‘M. Antelme will understand.’ Another cheer, Antelme half-rising. ‘Nor, in my hopes for European changes, do I crave the unreal. M. Cocteau has said, here in Paris, city of Voltaire, of Jaurès, that the purity of revolution lasts a fortnight. But a daytime’s purity is hard to discover anywhere. In the camps, good people volunteered as spies, as executioners, for a few extra months of life.’ His massive hands tightened, relaxed, as if of themselves. ‘Mesdames, Messieurs, all occupied countries supplied recruits for the SS. My Norwegians formed the SS Nordland Division. In the camps, we were privileged, Honorary Teutons. I myself, in respect for my father, was brought special food from the Commandant’s house.’ He quietened, as if confiding to old friends. ‘That Commandant had been a Christian missionary. We called him the Storm Prince. He had a greenish-yellow colour and brown, venomous, stinging eyes under that cap with its death’s head and crossed bones. He hanged seven thousand, anyone under his gaze, gypsies, Jews … anyone. Yet that man, with his tiny eyes, foul laugh, his sharp teeth, sharp as ferrets’, had charm. And we Norwegians, the privileged, thrust others aside to jostle for his favours. We all beat, kicked, betrayed. We stole food from the most wretched of all, the “Mussulmen”, hollowed-out remnants of life, who had totally surrendered. We lifted the arms of the dying, to snatch their bread. All Europeans are kin to the SS captain who told his American captors that he ignored terrible conditions because they only concerned others.’

While he wiped his face with a handkerchief like a tablecloth, a different silence enveloped us, not admiring, not purposeful but timid, actually afraid, though I was uncertain of what. The big, fair man, in the loose, ill-fitting blue suit, with the badly knotted tie and clumsy manner, swallowed, shook himself like a bear, resumed, unnaturally straight, as if barely recovered from surgery.

‘I must finish … finish I must, with this. Lenin instructed us that hatred is the gist of Communism. That, in a sentence, is the case against it and its imitators. So, I repeat … that in the camps, we, who should have been Europeans, refused to unite, we remained nationalists, sectarians, party members, haters. We preferred politics to civilization. None were immune, not even Jews. Now, in a new Europe, we have to share the boat with the young. If it sinks, the Storm Prince will rescue us, one armband red, the other black. So let us not, I appeal, be like the Wise Man of Gothland who sawed off the branch on which he sat.’

He received the loudest acclaim since Churchill, though Malraux’s arms still did not stir. Mr Spender was hot and scarlet with appreciation, agog for the New Europe, and Trilling and I exchanged comradely smiles. Wilfrid might be correct: that conferences, committees, certain schools, libraries, households, a particular walled garden, his Gascon bistro, were dikes against the barbarism that had poisoned assemblies, unions, regiments, erased a European civility like the Revolution before it. Yet, I hesitated, both Stalin and Eisenhower must have thought themselves as dike-kings, preservers.

Succeeding speeches were too professional, too righteous. The microphone was faulty, so that two women, internationally admired, were alternately shrill and inaudible. All seemed in rehearsal, not yet word-perfect, unlikely to start a children’s crusade, ridicule the virtues of suffering – the Pétainist curse – and the boldness of Internal Emigration. A Lyons historian eloquently demonstrated that the war had been won by the superiority of French values. A British woman minister, short, red-haired, argued that the war had been justified by providing opportunities for decolonization and social reform. An Austrian youth, who should surely have worn lederhosen, well nourished, pale hair smeared on honey skin, delphinium-eyed, spoke of his father, killed by Russians in Kiev, his mother, killed by the British in Dresden. However – his pretty, indeed angelic smile assured us – he forgave everyone. ‘Industrial West Germany will lead Europe.’ He awaited applause that did not come. A Czech philosopher apologized for his country’s attitude to minorities and declared that the problem of existential freedom was no problem at all. Trilling showed no relief.

The overall assumption was that violence, malice, greed were unnatural aberrations, divorced from the true nature of man. Studying the rococo ceiling, its glimmering foliage and Olympian calm, I yearned for some Hermes to lean down, grinning, but could only await the lavish banquet, itself much derided by the Left and Poujardist press. I had been alarmed by a proposal from a minority, that an all-night vigil on behalf of the dead should be substituted. Wilfrid, though seldom reliable in such matters, supported the hungry majority.

Sleepy, I would have been glad of the Radetsky March and, should he still be awake, was astonished at Malraux’s patience. Great orator, he remained in wintry silence, his cigarette alone showing life. And then … speeches still sounded stylized, over-rhetorical, or were read from manuscript, very monotonously. Beautiful feelings, Gide had once said, make bad art. The dull drop of words would have withered butterflies. An Argentine advocated Spanish as universal language. Outside, Paris lingered on the tremulous frontier between blue afternoon and violet dusk. Despite the soft light, I was aware of a slight gleam on Wilfrid’s face, distinct from his dark formal coat and cravat. Impatience? Yet I had never known the extent of his expectations. Determination to speak? Horror, as Suzie would say. I had never heard him address a crowd, had often heard his indulgent disdain of those who did so. We had already endured the pontifical, judicial, indignant, abject and absurd. Trilling was glancing at his watch, Mr Spender was writing in a tiny book, perhaps audaciously rhyming a satire. A Toute Vie surgeon cited Aristotle on inferior races, the Canadian bishop stuttered that God finds intolerable Good Works performed without Faith, thereby insulting Nansen’s father, agnostic, whose good works were massive. Perhaps only the Hero of Gravelines could wake us into Walpurgis extravagance, quicken Mrs Meier, Dr Flake, His Finnish Excellency, into a Dionysiac can-can. The Belgian, despite his bloodshot rant, was another Storm Prince: he had once almost drowned in the Meuse, rescuing a homosexual whom he loathed, personally and on principle.

And then … A stir jerked, then alarmed me. Wilfrid had left his chair, was already centre stage, fingering the mike with patient forbearance, almost comic helplessness, and touched by the last splendours of sunset piercing the heavy, classical windows. My throat tightened as it had done when, very gently but firmly, Father had contradicted the Herr General. Trembling, I had awaited an anger that did not come. In this fumed density of fatigue, impatience, incipient hostility, a Wilfrid was least needed. His audience was not of dolts, gullible Wolf’s Lair freebooters but a salon of trained minds, and I wanted to step past Trilling and flee.

Wilfrid, still adjusting the machine, looked apologetic, incompetent, too diffident, unconvinced of his right to stand aloft and demand attention. I was certain that his style would be too opaque, his personality too elusive, his text lumbered with the unnecessary – tyche, feng-shui. Could he but ration his regard for Eckhart and Tolstoy.

His tone, never javelin sharp, was conversational, edged with the humour that overcame by not noticing dissent. Malraux, barometer at zero, now recovered, gained height, so that he forwent cigarettes and sugar, and Spender, haloed in a sun-shaft, pocketed his pocket-book.

‘I am not, or not yet, religious and confess, rather shame-facedly, that I do not love my enemies, though managing to respect strangers. I have no difficulty in preferring instant retribution to slow, even-handed justice. Aristophanes …’ he raised a deprecatory finger against any accusation of pedantry, or the glare of Aristophanes, while I remembered the Herr General’s zest for duelling, ‘did tell us that the sun bestows glory on all mindful of the sacred obligation due to strangers and neighbours. Some of you may object that the glory is also bestowed on the wicked and unneighbourly. Well, there are hopes even for them. Some of them!’

Though he did not laugh, he appeared to have done so, and reassurance rippled over the large, tensed gathering. Slight, not appeasing, but as equal amongst equals, he was measured, fluent, clear as the bell of the Palace of Justice.

‘To do the right thing for unorthodox reasons has never much troubled me. To discover the right thing is sufficiently arduous. The rest I leave to the learned and philosophical. The highest of all German voices, already mentioned, long ago told us that in the beginning was the Deed. Better to act, perhaps unwisely, than do nothing. Here in France, the Revolution, of which I admit to some reservations, considered humanity’s chief enemies were the indifferent. Those who existed only on paper. Yet enemies, the wicked, survive very close …’ At this, Golda Meier looked around, eyebrows black, almost in accusation, a nervous titter sounded, though Malraux nodded, Trilling flickered assent, and, behind Wilfrid, Buber nodded encouragement.

‘Herr Flake has generously reminded us of the qualities of Internal Emigration, though this unlocks no prisons, halts no deaths, leaves freedom only to the wicked. What a plain, wholesome word that is!’ He halted briefly, to savour it, connoisseur over a new arte-fact. ‘Still, few of our enemies are visible, they are more insidious. You may remember that a great socialist, his nationality, by definition, is immaterial, wrote that the lie had become a European Great Power. It had, of course, always been so. Who does not remember Odysseus, Virgil and at least three Popes? This afternoon, we have heard no lies but insufficient truth, though I fear you will not hear much more from me. At best, some reminders, against the bland. We are, we like to think, the righteous, proud of ideals, we despise expediency. We desire not news but wisdom, and truth is forgivable. Yet we have seen our betters, majestic writers, marvellously bearded thinkers, declare, “I do not mind if it is a lie, I believe it.”’

The hush wavered between degrees of unease, and I gripped my knees. As if acknowledging a sententious priggishness, Wilfrid quickened his delivery, was lighter, bantering. ‘My own favourite writers were mostly moral hooligans. I read them with gratitude, of course, with awe, but their hospitality would stir up misgivings. To play cards with Dostoevsky, hire a bed from Rimbaud, spend a week deafened by Luther …’ Some chuckles, a long wide curve of pleasure, before he continued. ‘We have been advised to erase the past, start anew, all sins forgotten. Finely intentioned amnesia. An attractive prospect, but attractive only because it is impossible. The dead have powers, too easily overlooked. For myself, I treasure the past, its display of diversities, personalities, encounters, achievements, for which Paris remains so unforgettable.’

Shadows around his eyes and mouth were familiar: conciliatory, temporizing, questioning, they suggesting not a professor but a quiet fellow student. The sunset glow faded, the great room was darkening, as though management was reluctant to jolt us with sudden lights while he continued.

‘We need not dispense with a past still largely travestied by the Lie, nor with a future, doubtless disreputable. There is always today. To collect evidence, then use it. However …’ In the fractured light, encroaching obscurities, he appeared taller, sterner. ‘I am imposing too many abstractions on you, masquerading as a preacher, evading urgency and necessity. We are in Cold War, which may heat up. Our Spanish, Polish and Baltic delegates are exiles. Thousands crouch in sewers. In one country, unrepresented here, men still in power, for their own motives promoted famine, then decreed that eating corpses was uncouth. Such a regime will not collapse from whatever we ourselves decree. Absurdity may one day become the more effective. I have lately been in Spain, and there I read an exhortation from the Generalísimo, no less: “Let us go Straight Forward Together.” And, do you know’ – God, he seemed about to discharge that cracked, over-noisy laugh, but instead was very casual – ‘they’d posted it on a hair-pin bend!’

A rumble of mirth enabled him to calculate our mood and when to reach his curtain lines. ‘We have not allowed much attention to the paradoxes of authority, and its use of the Lie. Only saints, anarchists and the sluggish actually reject authority with, I suspect, all the authority they can muster. I myself, like most of us, respect authority, have occasionally had to use it, without appetite and to small effect. My own exemplar is Cincinnatus, whom the Founding Fathers adopted as an American. Given power, he does a difficult job, then unobtrusively retires. A lesson to Europe.’

The response was muted, at some possible allusion to de Gaulle, but he acknowledged it without dismay or annoyance but with the enjoyment of a conjurer about to produce a favourite trick, without flourish but successfully.

‘I will give you another example, doubtless better known. John Rabe.’ Trapped off-guard, assuming an over-sophisticated joke, a few laughed knowingly, the rest left puzzled or blank: Malraux, failing the test, shrugged, sought his green bag, Trilling glanced at me enquiringly, and I examined the floor.

Modest, Wilfrid was scarcely disclaiming his own authority. ‘It would be easy to offer some reputation honoured and undisputed: Helmuth von Moltke, Pastor Bonhöffer, Regine Karlin, Mlle Weil, Herr Nansen’s father. However …’ – pronounced more heavily, this, like ‘but’, had a speck of grit – ‘though on their achievements, authority at its most selfless, any new Europe must rest. Permit me to broaden the matter. To reach back to 1937. The sack of Nanking. Thousands raped, murdered, tortured with brutal refinements, on a scale not then paralleled within memory. This was halted by one man, by personal courage and authority, by John Rabe. One of our time’s grand gestures. And who was he?’ Yet again he stopped, enjoying the tease. ‘Theologian? Quaker? First Violinist? No, Heaven preserve us, he was a convinced, a pure – if you will forgive the word – National Socialist. He believed in all that we should not believe, yet even in Mao’s China he is revered as a saviour. In him, not in any Führer or Generalissimo, is our difficulty, the self divided by what Charles Dickens called the attractions of repulsion. That we can cherish several contradictions simultaneously. This is fearsome as plague or truncheons and fostered by obedience and the microphone – not, at this very moment, at its most obedient. Did not Faust lament the two rival souls within his breast? We ourselves may resolve – a Resolution. We may even, with one soul, publish no less than a communiqué …’ – the mild sarcasm was another trick of the trade, the performance meticulously prepared, with its chatty flippancy, the dandyesque humour – ‘but with another soul we will disown it. Exquisite hopes, detailed plans, can be unconscious of the creative flaws, riven psyche, scarcely credible energies, of a Rabe. Genius attempts it, and there is much genius amongst us, but genius tends to despise government and hold its nose at committees. I myself am guilty of much that I deplore. A guest in Paris, where Zola once spoke out, I can remind you of Gautier saying that one can journey through one’s own times, yet not see them. European Reconstruction is splendidly visible, but somewhere, overlooked, outside, is the arsonist, the joker, the irreconcilable, the exhibitionist, apt to be romanticized by literature, cinema, by folklore, into the Good Terrorist – as, you may judge, I have romanticized Rabe. And here I am, interminable, keeping better speakers waiting, with no Resolution, no Communiqué, unable to split atoms, write a poem, libel Miss Garbo. Bien entendu.’

I supposed he had finished, but he was being handed a note from Golo Mann, which he lifted in acknowledgement, while examining us for signs of exhaustion, dissatisfaction, a meaning glance from the chairman, and had actually stepped back, until protests recalled him. At any instant, brilliant lights would sweep over us, but they remained withheld. The ceiling had vanished, no winged Hermes would snigger cynical improprieties, no Mirabeau thunder wild words, no bronzed epitaphs clatter from on high. Instead, Wilfrid probably ending with a joke, not uproarious, not very amusing.

‘How I have meandered! I have refused to love my enemies, queried religion, obeised myself to history, exalted a man with appalling views and apache behaviour and, I dare say, have mis-quoted Gautier. I will now commit one further iniquity. Unfashionable though it is in current literature, I enjoy stories, and, with your permission – should you refuse, I will shuffle away without grievance – I will tell you one. Your gaiety may not be a hurricane, your applause scanty, but I promise you my story is short, merest trifle. A children’s story.’

My disquiet rushed back, my body winced at one stanza too many, maladroit whimsicality. ‘Wilfrid’s come!’ Some legend of Mickey Rooney or Astaire’s father, a variation of a pied piper or children lost in a forest. ‘They tasted delicious.’ Could he only remind himself that people could no longer be shocked, though some might still dread being alone!

Dimmed, twilit, his colleagues submerged in shadows, Wilfrid was anonymous in all but his voice. ‘Some of us deny the reality of evil, some the notion of free will. I like to believe them mistaken. Free will may, of course, be negligible, but it is more useful, more engaging, to act on the hypothesis that it exists. As for the other, my story, my very short story which I maintain I have freely chosen to tell you …’ Faces strained forward for the treat, my own nerve was paralysed. ‘Let us imagine a green hill in summer. A benevolent sun, playful breeze, innocent grass. Some buildings behind a metal fence and tall gates, polished, hygienic, conforming to all regulations yet known. A village street, respectable citizens, a pastor, children with balloons, footballs, bags of sweets. And a little railway station, a nursery of delight, with colourful flowerpots, a flag, a board pasted “Welcome”, officials braided as archdukes. Had a band been available, it would have played Mozart. Now a train arrives, carriages open and, behold, more children. An operetta? Let us see. The small travellers are herded out. They are timid, perhaps hungry. On the streets, the grown-ups are silent, but their offspring, the home team, are shouting. But what? Are we hearing aright? Surely we are mistaken. But listen. “Up in smoke,” they cry, “on Death Hill.” More officials are rounding up the unhappy newcomers, badly dressed wraiths. The village children change their tune, they are friendly, almost flirting, holding out their gifts, the balloons, footballs, sweets. How delightful! The parents stout with family pride. Still hesitant, the strangers are lured through the gates, to Grandmother Wolf, the Demon Magician and his puff of smoke.’

He was as if issuing a company report, unemotional, glossing over the failure of dividends and with the shareholders absent. ‘We need not condemn those children, though I am disposed to rebuke them. As for the adults, the worthless mayor and godless pastor, you have your own thoughts. Perhaps we should be born fully dressed and without parents!’

He surveyed us, distinguishable only from the gleam of the microphone and a thin light from the window. ‘Goethe – how we conscript him to back our briefs – submitted that only the spectator has a conscience. Can this really be true?’

8

The Conference induced my own chimeras, of accompanying Malraux to Mexico or Cambodia, following Trilling around respectful universities, even, like Golda Meier, addressing a nation. More lasting were images of those children at Malthausen, Odd Nansen’s ‘Mussulmen’, skeletal splinters, sockets more visible than eyes, boned elbows unnaturally slanted, moving blindly, all thoughts burnt out, pushed by impulse and hunger, attached to nothingness.

More substantial outcomes were still nebulous. The Conference had been summarized as another step towards European unity, a comedy of bourgeois self-regard, a CIA conspiracy, a chance to interview celebrities.

Outwardly, Wilfrid was satisfied. ‘These assemblies are like authors, who so seldom know the effect they have, profound or negligible. Listening, not least to myself, I remembered an epigram ascribed, with whatever likelihood, to the unfortunate Pétain, that a certain individual knew everything, but that was all he did know. I would not entrust my fortunes to Herr Flake if we were stranded on the Great Barrier Reef.’

Disturbed, I thought again of England, an obstinate energy that had sailed cockleshell ships down wind to the edge of the world, scattered banks and language like acorns, hauled cathedrals into the sky. Hegel, so deplored by Father, had condemned the English as unattracted to abstract principles. High praise.

No Inner Emigration for me, no Heimat. Yet I could not forget an incident at the Conference. Wilfrid had, with his habitual solemnity, introduced me as his ‘learned confederate’, to a Herr Felder, very flabby, very dull. I was reserved, probably curt, in haste to escape. Next day, in Le Figaro’s Conference leader, I was infuriated to read that Josef Felder had recklessly defied the Stuttgart SS and, in the Reichstag, denounced the 1933 Enabling Bill, which established the dictatorship.

Wilfrid’s solicitude, I thought, must now be disguising some impatience, and he could have felt that, in rejecting Felder, I had missed an opportunity most essential to my development. He himself, in the busy Conference aftermath, was often too fatigued to do more than listen to music, and, with him, I believed that he shared Father’s taste not only for achievement but for failure. Uncertain of my future, my position, I overdid efforts to amuse him with stories and gossip and must have irritated him, though he only showed reticent gratitude for permission to hear my exceptional reminiscences. Nevertheless, what had for so long seemed affectionate irony, now, I feared, was faintly hostile sarcasm. We had fewer walks, Marc-Henri, too obviously Lisette’s favourite, may have noted my unease. ‘I am a person.’ He spoke as if reminding me of the universe.

One morning, I was talking to Wilfrid. Gently disengaging, he left the room to find a book and did not return for three weeks, taking Marc-Henri with him. I had apprehension of an emptied stage, unseen hands preparing a new set, actors rebuilding their personalities, rehearsing another cryptic vaudeville.

Alone in the apartment, I was, with disquiet, more aware of its symmetry: books, paintings, flowers arranged in perfect lines, absolute balance, as if in an ideal empyreum in which I could only disappoint.

Simultaneously, life was raging: upheavals with Suzie, embryo poem with Falls and Ascents. Desiring ultimate simplicities, I was stranded in her half-surrenders, sudden retreats, occasional anger, the behaviour, I judged, to be expected from the young and powerful. It was the impact of what Jünger called being drunk without wine and, besotted, I was as uncertain as I had been in childhood, wondering which was more real, my Turret world, or that of adults, with its puzzles and initiations.

We continued our morning strolls, afternoon cafés, less often by night. Any move, however slight, was a move towards victory or defeat. Outside a small bistro, she grabbed my hand and put it to her cheek, a landmark in a week of stratagems and non-sequiturs. ‘Young Berserker!’ She almost sang it, grimacing, head tilted back: small peaked cap, dark glasses, her knowledge of the North still rudimentary: elks, Northern Lights, Lapland forests, all clustered in a single movie-shot. She called me Viking Lars, as if I had been hacked from an iceberg, from a country swarming with beasts elsewhere extinct, where lust-ridden heiresses swung themselves over torrid grooms and pastors galloped into hell. A North unnecessary as St Helena, fugitives like myself strong but pitiable mastiffs roaming Paris, the world’s centre.

Yet we were in an urgent, throbbing, moment, a perpetual ‘Is’. I attempted to entertain her with Forest Uncle, Margarita-Who-Grieves, huge winter suns over the Sound, bows cutting water as summer folk sailed to ‘Ogygia’. I boasted of Count Pahlen, enthused more energetically about Gulf Wind with its scraps of salt, pine, sand, and attempted to excite her by descriptions of wild geese soaring for the moon, the Lake sprinkled with fancy, the girl running, but, in stagy patience, she was silent. Yet, never breathless for adventure, she saw other things and shrank from them behind her mimes, spurts of ribaldry, her dances. War and Occupation remained unmentionable. She wished to forget.

I had my own preoccupations – commissars’ eyes like straps, like hooks, Meinnenberg, scrap-heap disregarded by history but surfacing in dreams. That I could have led partisans, sabotaged a train, was as unlikely as Wilfrid stoning a cat, Trilling betraying friends to McCarthy or Primo Levi choosing to forget, but Let’s cancelled misgivings, regrets, indecisions, and concern with the illusion of self, the non-existence of evil. With her, clichés were original, action not despicable but trite. Not violence, not news, not slogans, but windows, lamps, advertisements gleamed with possibility, like souls. Air sparkled, parks glittered, walls had spirit, the dyed hair was thrillingly appropriate. When our hands met, they dispersed all else. Only the nebulous was solid. Images flashed hysterically, the dull tree actually ashine with Iduna’s apples as if freshly risen from the Underworld: a cracked mirror was a vista into myth, a fountain was the exuberant surge of existence, thoughts worthy of Frodi the Unthinking and which, if spoken, would have provoked her mockery, make her the elder, more determined, always in command.

Freed from Conference jargon, words hitherto colourless – table, jug, tile – were repolished. Light noosed the Dôme, silver rippled the Seine, woods were Corots, all goading me towards less talk, more writing, but yet again, when pen touched paper, fragmentary vision collapsed.

However, in side streets, recesses, buses, Suzie was irresistible, caustic, joking, scowling at passers-by, pulling me into a shop, never buying. Sometimes she sent a postcard, often with an obscene picture, Lisette disapproving, though usually only to apologize for failing a date – ‘studio business’ – or cancelling another with less explanation. In brisk switches of mood, we were, and were not, like the gods. Whether or not she used drugs I never cared to ask. Wary of Lisette, she never rang.

Autumn was near, the year sagging, streaking trees with gold, emptying the parks of afternoon children. The news was stiff with portents, as though the Conference had never been. Words had fallen like snowflakes and, like snowflakes, died. An exiled Lithuanian poet, Conference delegate, was found hanged in the Bois; Americans, often black, complained of being trailed by the CIA; we read of a father kept locked in a garden cage.

As if affected by lower skies, capricious suns, Suzie became less animated. ‘I’m a drying pond, Lars. Eggshell in a flood.’ Sexual politics were corrupting the studios, vilifying or obstructing talent. A last-minute story change had wrecked a promise, Gabin had reneged, a modelling contract had been returned, unsigned.

One evening she abruptly decided we should ‘go club’ in a drab Left Bank subterranean hideaway. We arrived during in an Italian movie, a jumble of discordant sequences without clear narrative. A child was disembowelled by hooded women, live goldfish gnawed by naked revellers, gorillas sparred in boxing gloves, a swastika slowly straightened into the Cross of Lorraine, a dance was staged like flamingo mating-habits, echo of a Rathaus ball, the Duce’s bald head peeled to a skull, perhaps fulfilling the programme’s promise to illustrate the Metaphysical Absurd, the Intricacies of Nothing, the Folly of Purpose. Soughs of rapture shook an audience in which the fashionable, the workaday and pin-table loungers awash with plonk sat in unsteady mass. Once a voice breathed ‘Now’, primed for the ghoulish as a knife hovered before a flower transforming to a delicate, adolescent throat. Another conference, also dedicated, but to what?

Suzie was professionally intent, though the tensions suited her, creature of sunless noons.

In climax, a smiling, androgynous youth, in leaves and panther-skin, face soft as candy-floss, gypsum-white, with cruel lips and eyes, minced from pines and dunes, naked adolescents capering around him waving garlands to shrill pipes, before rushing to maul a cloaked voyeur. A crone, his unwitting mother, spied with sickly interest and received, gloating, his severed head and rigid penis, the audience at one in laughter, bravos, rhythmical stamps.

Afterwards, red wall-lamps glowed, benches were stacked away, dancing began to a tinny record player, jewelled girls clasping unshaven, denimed youths, both sexes earringed, braceleted, with fluorescent ties, cheap stones on noses, and naked bellies, all jigging, twirling, swaying in toxic intimacy while Suzie and I clung together as if on a shifting raft, enclosed by faces, spoilt or unfinished in the Mars-light. The beat was ruthless; from a mask, yellow and black as a pansy, someone murmured that I should shout when I whispered. Suzie, eyes half-closed, fondled my hair, but her words were inaudible. Clasping her tight I was numbed, the stolid outsider amongst children of hideous sales, deals, scuffles of Occupation. But her hand was on mine, I muttered stock endearments, feeling neither alone nor fully with her, but in a bubble which distorted feelings, even appearances, to agitated flakes, spun by saxophone and trumpet, the drum, a clarinet’s dissent, febrile screeches; or were blurred by the low ceiling, the crush of mouths, jutting breasts, close walls.

A seamed face on a young body thrust between us, the owner one-armed, his grey shirt dripping. ‘They rush for answers. Sartre, Sagan. And Bardot. But find only Sartre, Sagan. And Bardot. Me, I never left my room for two years. Didn’t need to. So much went on, I had only to lie back and watch. And, mark that, to count.’

He giggled uncontrollably, Suzie steered me away, more masks and faces, hemming us in like a just-alive stockade until her own face abruptly awoke, her eyes widened in dismay, pricked by mutters, thrilled, scared or expressionless, that an Algerian snake-charmer was amongst us and had released his pet, uncharmed, charmless. Suzie tugged me. ‘Outside. Quick.’

For the first time she permitted me to escort her home, towards low-living Saint-Antoine. A momentous instant, though she was brooding, rapt in herself, small. Disdaining a bus, she finally halted at a tenement lit by a feeble lamp over the central door. At the concierge’s lodge she was dejected. ‘These goodbyes …’ As if to herself, but giving me hope, she mumbled, ‘something gone. It needn’t be so. Shouldn’t.’

She blinked rapidly, tweaked my coat, gave a short indeterminate laugh, her lips touched my mouth. The night made her small; with an incomplete swirl of her cloak she was gone. The door slammed, I was trudging away, indignant, self-pitying, wondering. Could she be ashamed of some physical blemish? Was she the dangerous woman of folk-memory, the seal-maiden, vixen-girl, snake-bride?

The week was rainy, cold, threatening premature winter, an ambiguous, surreal season, the Column halved by mist, Notre Dame in wide separated pieces, trees swollen, women furred and feathered, moving fast, overgrown. As if in repertory, I enacted the stalled lover, imperturbable officer, the spy, ready to lurk beneath her window, not yodelling to a guitar but counting her clients.

We quarrelled when I suggested we travel south, to the sun, speaking, as if from experience, of red roofs, Roman stone, midget harbours; of Antibes, Saint-Tropez, Le Touquet, Cap Ferrat, Cannes, names of pleasure and corruption, each, as the list mounted, making her angrier, her refusal adamant as a warrant. She, too, was playing parts, changeable as clouds.

The sun returned, we stood in the Bois above the deserted Grand Lac, surrounded by fern and myrtle, tawny chestnut and the soundless purr of falling leaves. Gnats hung over the water as if painted. A setting for lovers, genuine or counterfeit. Gold and russet, blacks and reds, reminders of bark and resin, spruce and oak, mushrooms and Old Men of the Earth, of Marie-Filled-with-Woes, covert offerings to Fenris, a ghost dwindling to damp air, though, in darkness, staring me to sleep. While Suzie, secluded, private, gazed into trees, black-headed gulls flurried up, like choristers turning their pages. I thought of amber gleaming on a beach, birch leaning back in the wind, brilliant surf mating with rock and sand, dragonflies zigzagging over marsh, until the North, Paris itself, shrivelled to a bleached hand in mine and a sticky groin.

Her own thoughts were probably more exceptional but indecipherable. Her head, shoulders, arms were far removed from me, and neither of us was willing to spoil the silence. Foliage blocked the late afternoon hum, and I tried to recall an Estonian belief about the language of trees, more musical than verbal. Then she smiled, not at leaf or water but up at me, sighting a friend and ally.

The sun chilled, moving us back to the Avenue, then poorer streets, lights already starting. She slipped an arm around me, insisting we walk. Windows, frontages, smells eventually became recognizable. Her door, the axe-headed concierge at her own porch. Suzie did not hesitate, and I followed her in as if by right. Storm Prince in a hurry, too excited to do more than realize a large room illuminated by a violet-shaded lamp, jazzy, mildly erotic posters, bright mats and cushions, chromium-limbed chairs, floppy pouffe, plastic flowers, a hi-fi construction, movie-stills tacked on a door. She poured me sour white wine then, on the floor, looked sylvan, fresh, in green coat, black trousers. I moved closer, to loll beside her, but she jumped up to put on a record, indescribably nasty, then placed herself on a window seat as if prepared to yell for help. My assurance ebbed, we could be cartoon stooges, caricatures of puritan courtship.

The music swung, jittered, then grounded. I was eager to plunge, grab, strip, her sigh, mock-resigned, implied readiness to succumb, when a thump shook the outside door. She swore, but despite my plea to ignore it she rushed away, while I waited, hands still at my belt, desire rampant.

A man’s voice, hurried whispers. Scuttling back, she was contrite though swiftly vanishing, reappearing in mini-skirt, light-red wrap, breasts near naked. On her toes she kissed me, in haste to depart missing my lips, smudging my chin. ‘Chérie, must go … an offer … I’ve a car. Don’t go. Will be back … André … agent …’

Left almost at the winning post I lingered on the course, held by a small fringed face, now ardent, now petulant, unexceptional and at this moment absentee, withdrawn by a dubious agent for some spurious project or let-down. Urgency stretched, slowly subsided, might not revive. Tempted to leave her to a cold, empty bed, I was simultaneously curious, to explore, uncover intimacies, be relieved to discover none.

The bedroom was small, scented, tidy, the bed narrow, unsuggestive of gasps and tumbles, Alexandrian subtleties, Manhattan vigour, Left Bank explosives. I rummaged through a small bureau, a sham-antique chest, at the dressing-table examined combs, tweezers, tiny pots, powders, then scarves still in tissue, cheap handbags, jaunty caps, an umbrella with mina-bird handle, gloves from Germany, a 1944 Montpellier visa. No diaries, address books, engagement tablets, nothing of me or anyone else. Within a jumble of empty millinery boxes and imitation-leather suitcases I did find a yellow folder, but it contained only a routine picture postcard of Pétain, Hero of Verdun, Father of the French.

Irritated, I tried the last redoubt, a wardrobe in the featureless bathroom. Therein, moth-ravaged gowns, some sheets, pillow-slips. And then. Ah! A large plastic bag buried under piled blankets, with plate-silver clasp and heavier than it looked.

Unease prickled, like that when only half realizing a burglary. Something not quite right, but what?

The clasp opened easily, revealing only Vichy coins, wartime permits, stamped food cards, a cigarette case, possibly aluminium, stamped H.H. Some beads, brooches, tins ornate but valueless. No family mementoes. One smaller bag, grey, entwined with gold threads, containing more useless coins, costume jewels, then a soiled Provençal clipping of a girl, bald, weeping, surrounded by angry townsfolk. Southern Spite. Recognition came very slowly, though eventually stabbing sharp as the Snow Queen’s kiss.