He must have realized that, after having "wolfed it down," he could not then spit it out just as it stood, and quickly corrected the image in more aggressive tones: "Don't tell me you're going to come out with all that old stuff about twenty million Russians killed in the war!"
The intellectual with the ash gray hair elaborated with, "The great trump card of nationalist propaganda."
The conversation became general.
"The German-Soviet pact," interrupted the ex-minister.
"If it hadn't been for the Americans Stalin would have invaded the whole of Europe," said a woman, still young, who spoke like someone reciting a lesson.
"You know those twenty million must have included everyone who died of old age. Over four years that's quite a crowd!" wisecracked the ex-minister.
"The Katyn massacres…" chimed in the official from the culture ministry.
"Our duty to remember…" added the intellectual.
"Repentance…" intoned a man who a few minutes earlier had collided with a woman at the salad table and had made an apologetic face: exactly the same as now when speaking of repentance.
"Listen, it's very simple. In the archives I slaved over in Moscow it's as plain as the nose on your face. If the Russians hadn't dragged their feet in Poland and Germany at least half a million men could have been saved. Hold on, it can't hurt to do a bit of number crunching."
The filmmaker took a daybook out of his pocket with a cover that opened out onto a little pocket calculator. Several people leaned forward to follow his explanations better. I could hear my own voice, as if from outside myself, booming away above these bowed heads. I tried to say that, when liberating a camp the soldiers could not use artillery or assault grenades, and that often they had to go in without shooting because the Germans sheltered behind the prisoners, and that out of two hundred men in a company only a dozen were left at the end of a battle.
The ringing of a telephone buried in someone's bag interrupted these wasted words. People began patting their pockets, rummaging in their bags. In the end the filmmaker grabbed the machine out of his own jacket pocket. Cursing, he swung his body out of the armchair and moved away a few paces. Without him the conversation split up into couples and was lost in the general hubbub of the room.
I made my way through the crowd, seeking to rid myself of a feeling of nausea at having said too much. But the words I had just spoken came back to haunt me in increasingly irreparable tones: "Without artillery… With their bare hands… Human shields…" In the looks I encountered I felt I was sensing the ironic tolerance people have for what is, at the end of the day, a harmless gaffe. It struck me that I should have found it easier to make myself understood by that Wehrmacht officer barking out his orders on the square in the Brest Litovsk citadel than by these people sipping their drinks.
Stopping in a recess in front of the window, beside a piano pushed against the wall, I studied the room for a moment, the little gathering around the tables with the remains of the food, the circle I had just left, other groups. The filmmaker, whom I had not at first noticed, was seated near to me on the piano stool. He was shouting into his telephone while swinging round in little abrupt half turns that reflected the vehemence of his replies: "No, listen, I'm not a charity! It's already costing us an arm and a leg. Okay, but they should lower their commission. No, keep your hat on, I'm not holding a gun to anyone's throat… Nor to anyone's head either, I mean… You'd have to be the biggest dumbass in the world to offer them a million and a half. Yes, but it was figured in, pal. Hold on, I can tell you that right away. Provided we keep the rate that was quoted, all in all what you'll get is…"
He laid his daybook-cum-calculator on the lid of the piano and began doing his numbers and communicating the result to his interlocutor. If he had looked up he would have seen a kind of admiration in my eyes.
At that moment the memory of the soldier came back to me. Surrounded by his comrades, he paused on the brink of what must once have been a narrow river, and was now stagnant, clogged up with human ashes and corpses. After a few seconds' hesitation he walked into the yellowish liquid, the others following him, soon wading in up to their chests, and emerging covered in sticky scum. And they began running toward the rows of barbed wire, toward the watchtowers.
It now came to me that in the absurd discussion after the film I should simply have spoken about that soldier. And especially about those few minutes between the moment when he plunged into the brown porridge containing a thousand dead people in suspension and the second when, still conscious, he raised his hand to his face, half blown away by shrapnel. Yes, I should have explained that it was the sight of that water that had slowed down the soldiers' advance (oh, that Russian slowness!). Nothing could amaze them any more, not blood, not the infinite diversity of wounds, not the resistance of bodies that, though dismembered, mangled, blind, still clung to life. But this beige scum, these lives reduced to dust… The soldiers hesitated, as if on the brink of what reason could not conceive.
At that moment, in front of the almost bare table, I saw the filmmaker turning a glass upside down, no doubt to see if anyone had been drinking from it. A young woman (the one who had announced that Stalin could have invaded Europe), obliged to shout because of the noise, was speaking to him 'with her mouth close to his ear, directing a whole pantomime of gestures at his ear as if this organ could see. Beyond the swaying of heads the intellectual with the ash gray hair was holding forth, surrounded by the figures of women, and his hands were making hypnotic passes. In the circle around the ex-minister and his girl-wife they were roaring with laughter.
The idea of telling them about the soldier suddenly seemed unthinkable. No, I had simply to imagine his mute, invisible presence somewhere in this room, where the aromas of sauces and wine spilled on the carpet lingered. I should observe his gaze-first at the sequences of the film, then at these mouths, eating, tasting the wine, smiling, talking about the camps. The soldier's gaze did not judge, it focused on things and beings with a wry detachment and understood everything. It understood that the people in the room who spoke of millions of victims, of repentance, of the duty to remember, were lying. Not that the victims had not existed. The soldier still had their ashes stuck to his hands, to the folds in his tunic. But at the time of their martyrdom and their death each of them had a face, a past, that not even the serial number tattooed to their wrists had succeeded in obliterating. Now they were conveniently assembled into these anonymous millions, an army of the dead that was constantly being paraded about in the great bazaars of ideas. The soldier had no difficulty in grasping that the sinister building in the film, belching forth black smoke and producing human ashes, had become a real family business for the filmmaker and his friend. And, like good salesmen, this fat man with his pocket calculator and his thin friend with his dogmatic voice, they and their countless ubiquitous doubles uttered deafening rallying cries, hurled abuse at the indifferent, cursed the incredulous. They did not allow the millions of dead a moment's peace, reviving their torture in front of cameras, on the pages of newspapers, on screens. Every day they had to find something new. First it was the spuriously contrite face of a bishop collapsing into repentance. Next the police, like inconsolable penitents, asking forgiveness for the errors of their colleagues half a century ago. Then one day this brilliant notion! Why not accuse the soldiers who liberated the camps of being too slow? The thin men and the fat men were indefatigable in invoking the memory, but, curiously enough, the fuss they made provoked forget-fulness. For they talked about millions without faces, like those cascades of zeros that appeared on their pocket calculators.