I knew that the soldier would not have taken the trouble to deny or debate. His gaze would have been silent. He would have observed the room and would no doubt have formed a single impression that summed up everything: ugliness. Ugliness of words, ugliness of thoughts, ugliness of the shared lie. The extraordinary ugliness of that young woman's face, leaning toward the filmmaker's ear, her young body, tall and lithe, contorted with the hypocrisy of the words the man was listening to with paternal indulgence. Ugliness of all these faces and these bodies, smooth through careful grooming, rubbing shoulders in the agreeable coziness of the in-crowd. The infinite ugliness of that France.
No, the soldier would not have been thinking about all that. His silent presence would have placed him far away from these well-nourished bodies, these minds well versed in the conventional wisdom, far from the hypnotists of memory and the dealers in millions of dead. In this faraway place there was the barbed-wire entanglement on which he had fallen, transforming his own body into a bridge for those who followed him. Beyond his death, there was that instant when, in the liberated camp, the echo of the last shot fired faded away, those blurred minutes when the soldiers who had survived were roaming among the barrack huts with their gaping doors, among the bodies, disposed according to the whims of death, long minutes when they were getting used to feeling they were alive, to seeing the tranquillity of the sky, to being able to hear. In those first instants there was a wounded man, wearing the uniform of a penal company, a young soldier crumpled up against the wall of a hut, his hands pressed against his belly and filled with blood. He cried out, asking for water. But the others, still deafened by the last of the explosions, did not hear him. As the burning pain increased, it seemed to him that no one in the universe heard his cry. He was wrong. A man was coming toward him, very slowly, for he was afraid of falling. This man without flesh, without muscles, clad in striped rags, was moving like a child learning to walk and all his equilibrium was derived from an old bowl filled with water clutched in his hands. It was the water he had gathered from a drainpipe's tiny drips. Water that had already saved life. The wounded soldier saw the prisoner, saw his eyes sunk in his emaciated skull and fell silent. There was nothing more in the world, just these two pairs of eyes slowly approaching each other.
Thinking about that prisoner gave me a feeling of joy I could not explain to myself I told myself simply that his look was not recorded by any pocket calculator adding up the millions, nor inscribed in any official martyrology. No one was forcing me to recollect him but he lived in my memory, a remarkable being in all the grievous beauty of his gesture.
Threading my way toward the exit between the groups of guests, I passed the girl-wife. Through the noise I could only grasp the last part of the remark she addressed to me: "… really enthralling!"
"Yes, it was extremely interesting," I said, echoing her tone of voice.
She shook my hand, tugging on it slightly, which obliged me to lean over a little.
"It was quite true what you said about the German-Soviet pact," she said, screwing up her eyes as a mark of complicity.
"Well, it wasn't actually me who…"
"And then that… what was it you were saying? Katyn! What a story! Mind you, I've never trusted the Poles."
"Yes, well, but, it was really the Russians there, who…"
"My daughter has a Russian friend, you know, a delightful young woman, very cultivated. She speaks three or four languages. She's been everywhere. You must meet her some time. She plays the violin as well."
After hearing this detail I listened to the rest of the story distractedly. The violinist used to remark, "Scratch a Russian and you'll find a Tartar underneath." This turn of phrase delighted the girl-wife. Listening to her, I was waiting for a pause in the rhythm of her breathing that would enable me to take my leave. But the reserves of breath in that puny chest seemed inexhaustible. "Scratch a Pole, you know, and you'll find a…," she drew me toward her to round off her verdict. "Oh, but some of them are not like that at all!" I protested vainly.
At that moment among the groups of couples behind the girl-wife, I saw a man's face in profile that seemed to me both familiar and unrecognizable. I stared at him. The profile seemed to be smiling at someone other than the person he was talking to. I taxed my memory but before I could fix on either a name or a place, the face disappeared behind the moving throng of guests.
Between the end of one story and the immediate start of the next I succeeded in slipping in a brief word of good-bye and dove back into the crowd, wresting my hand away from the storyteller's grasp. The pact. Katyn. The terrible reputation of the Poles. This drawing room farrago, I told myself, was an indirect response to the lies of those hypnotists of memory. I saw them together, the filmmaker and the intellectual, a little apart from the others. A snatch of a sentence from their conversation cut through the din: "We'll get Jean-Luc's write-up tomorrow and then on Thursday…"
In the concierge's lodge the television was flickering with the last minutes of a match. Standing on the threshold the man looked both weary and still buffeted by the excitement of the game. "Four one! I've never seen anything like it!" he exclaimed, noticing my glance at the screen and in no doubt that one could hardly fail to be surprised by this score. I realized that the match had been broadcast during the screening of the film.
Near the exit a knot of people gathered, the one that forms at the end, the most talkative one, the slowest to disperse. I was waiting for these guests to slip, one by one, through the bottleneck of the door. Suddenly, disturbingly, for the second time I caught sight of a man's face, that discreetly smiling profile, whose smile, it was now clear to me, seemed aware of my presence. Like me, the man was waiting for the crowd to depart. I took a few steps toward him. He turned his head slightly. It was Shakh.
"There must be a stage door somewhere." Shakh spoke these words softly, as if to himself, and, avoiding the throng that was still blocking the exit, he began to climb a staircase at the end of the foyer. I followed him.
We found ourselves on the balcony of a glass-enclosed mezzanine floor that circled the room, which was already half empty of guests. The voices floating up sounded like those of vendors at the end of a street market, pointlessly loud and shrill among a mere handful of shoppers. You could also hear a series of suction-cup sounds, good-bye kisses accompanied by meows of politeness. The staff were moving the tables, rearranging the armchairs. As he walked along, Shakh looked at the room then turned, and I saw a weary expression on his face that seemed to be saying: "It's a hopeless case!"
No doubt he knew this other exit that led us out, as is often the case with cinema buildings, into a nighttime street in which it is difficult at first to recognize the building fronts. "I listened to your speech for the defense just now," he said, when we were settled in a brasserie. "And I was certainly the only one listening," he added with a slight smile. We sat for a moment without speaking. Outside the windows of the brasserie groups of young people were parading past, celebrating their team's victory with loud chanting and the waving of brightly colored flags.
"Yes, I listened to you, but I'd actually come to meet one of the film's sponsors… Would you like to guess who?"
"Some official in the Ministry of Culture who finances pseudo-documentary rubbish like this with the French taxpayer's money?"
"No, you're not even close."