Authors: Albert Cohen
He smiles as he ponders his fate. He'd succeeded once on the strength of his intelligence. Member of Parliament, government minister, et cetera. A success built on sand, because it had come through the exercise of his intelligence. Success on the high wire, with no safety-net. Unable to count on family or connections, the old-school tie, chums from childhood and adolescence, or any of the natural helping hands which weave the snugly fitting garment of solidarity with one's milieu, he had had only himself to rely on. He had been brought down by a princely blunder. And now he is a man alone. The rest of them, firmly embedded in the establishment, are all connected by a maze of protective threads to natural allies. Life is sweet for those who follow the normal path, so sweet that they do not realize quite how much they owe to their background and believe that their success is due entirely to their own efforts. The part played by family and long-standing friendships is vital to the extensive silver-spoon club of privy counsellors, Treasury officials and diplomats who never passed an examination in their lives. He would like to see how they would have fared in his shoes, clods who had been mollycoddled from birth and borne along from cradle to grave on the gentle social stream. If Proust had so wished, his papa could have calmly and with no trouble at all wangled a job for him in the Quai d'Orsay, because the moron Norpois, a chum of Proust the Father, was standing by ready to introduce Proust the Sprog to a collection of other morons. Oh, of course he knows they aren't morons and weren't hopeless at exams. He says morons, he says they can't pass exams because he, well, just let it go. Yes, he'd succeeded without the safety-net of clubbability. And then he'd made his blunder at the meeting of the Council of their League of Nations and had come a cropper. And the very next day he'd made an even more serious blunder: he'd sent an anonymous letter disclosing the irregularity in his naturalization papers. From that day on he has been a man alone and his country is a woman. He takes the packet sealed with sealing-wax from the drawer of his bedside table. Should he open it? Why not, he is entitled to a little happiness. But no. His father was Gamaliel of the Solals, the revered Chief Rabbi. He puts the packet back into the drawer.
Quickly now, find a Purpose. He rings for the waiter, then gets out of bed, checks that the door is locked, and waits. When the two knocks come, he orders the full breakfast through the door. Three fried eggs, bacon, coffee, toast, butter, croissants and English marmalade. Then he returns to bed, forces a smile and a contented sigh. Oh yes, old friend, I have a nice bed, very comfortable. The albino had cut him short, stood up and said he had other people to shee. Then he'd smiled to earn the nonentity's goodwill and a few extra minutes in which to plead his cause, and he'd given him the end of his speech, carefully rehearsed in the mirror the night before, had produced his arguments, which were clumsy and earnest. The kind of life he has inflicted on the woman he loves. His love of France and even his reasons for loving France. But the man is too French to understand his fervour, his need. So his speech got him nowhere and the man opened the door without saying a word. So then he told him he was finished. 'Sho shorry,' the man said.
Two knocks at the door. He is afraid to confront the waiter, a man of purpose from the world outside, a messenger from the land of the living, one of the lucky devils who has a place in the brotherhood of men. 'Leave the tray by the door, I'll come for it.' He waits for the sound of footsteps to die away, carefully opens the door a few inches, and looks left and right. No one watching. He gathers up the tray, quickly double-locks the door, removes the key, puts it under the pillow, and gets back into bed.
Sitting up in bed with the friendly tray in front of him, he smiles. Mram. These eggs and bacon smell good. Three little chums. Well, he's got his breakfast too, and it's bigger and better than the average lucky devil gets. Yes, but for the lucky devils the first meal of the day is a prelude to what goes on outside, provides them with the calories they need for intermingling with others of their own kind. Whereas in his case breakfast is just something to do, a short-term goal, ten minutes of solitary, sticky happiness. He opens
Le Temps
and gives audience to the world outside while at the same time surrendering to the dismal sensuality of food. He is quite aware that within a year at the outside he will commit suicide, and yet he calmly bites into his croissants, which he takes with lashings of butter and mounds of marmalade. Pity they hadn't brought the jar it had come in, with the Scottish soldier on the label. It's interesting to look at pictures on labels as you eat. It's company.
His short-lived pleasure now a thing of the past, he gets up. Where's the key? He looks for it here and then there, and as he looks he rolls his wrist in the action of turning a key, as a help to finding it.
Eventually he comes across it under his pillow and half opens the door. He stares at all the shoes lined up in the corridor outside the other doors. The feet of the carefree are his social connections. Last night, at around two o'clock, he felt crazily tempted to borrow some of them and lay them out on his bed. He leans out further for a better view. How happy all these well-polished, neady arranged, self-confident shoes look. Yes, precisely: self-confident. Their owners staying in the hotel have a purpose in life. In his case it's the opposite.
Footsteps. He shuts the door hurriedly and turns the key in the lock. A knock. It's the valet asking if it's all right to clean the room. 'No. Later.' When everything is silent once more, he executes a dance step in the wardrobe mirror and snaps his fingers like castanets. It doesn't really matter if he isn't happy. The happy die too. Having checked that the corridor is now empty again, he quickly puts the tray down outside the door, smartly hangs the 'Do not disturb' sign on the knob, turns the key twice in the lock, and pokes out his tongue. Saved!
He makes the bed carefully, then sets about tidying the room, using a face-towel for a duster. 'We look after our little ghetto, must keep our little ghetto looking nice,' he mutters, as though he is telling a secret. He moves two armchairs which- are too close together, clears away a jumble of books, and sets out the cigarette-boxes in a symmetrical pattern, with the ashtray in the middle. 'Oh yes, here in the ghetto we have a mania for tidiness. The point is that we can go on thinking everything's all right. We have tidiness as a substitute for happiness.' And such, gentlemen, he murmurs, are the amusements of the lonely. And then he croons that the pleasure of love lasts but a moment, deliberately sings in a shrill, effeminate falsetto, to while away the time, to put on a performance for himself, sings with feeling to decant his presently unemployed love into his song. What's this? Dust on the bedside table! He gives the marble top a quick wipe with the towel, which he shakes out of the window. Those tiny humans far below: all rushing, all with a purpose, all hurrying towards others of their own kind. He lowers the blind to blot them out. He draws the curtains so that he is not aware that there is a world outside, a world of hope and success. Ah yes, there was a time when he went forth to conquer, to captivate, to be loved. He had been one of them.
In the near dark he prowls around the room, furrow-browed, tweaking the occasional hair out of his scalp. Banished. Excluded. Of all the avocations existing outside, the only one now remaining to him is business, the manipulation of money, as it had been for his medieval forebears. Tomorrow, open a shop and set up as a pawnbroker, and on the door of the shop put up a brass plate. Have 'Patrician Moneylender' engraved on the brass plate. No, stay cooped up here in the George V and settle for living a life of luxury. Here, in this room, he can do whatever he wants — speak Hebrew, recite Ronsard, shout out that he is a monster with two heads and two hearts, that he belongs exclusively to the Jewish nation, exclusively to the French nation. Here, all alone, he can cover his shoulders with the sublime synagogue prayer-shawl and, if he feels like it, stick a tricolour rosette on his forehead. Here, gone to earth and alone, he will not see the mistrust in the eyes of those whom he loves but who do not love him. Go to the synagogue every day? But what does he have in common with all those respectable mumblers in bowler hats who fidget while they wait for the service to end, make sure they never neglect their business affairs and their outside interests, touch the brims of their hats when persons of influence pass by, and shed copious tears when, during the ceremony to mark his religious coming-of-age, they watch their boy reading the Prophets dressed like a proper little gentleman with a tiny bowler on his head. Trembling suddenly in the presence of the Almighty, he recites the eighteen blessings from the sabbath-day order of service.
'We are in love with you, my heart and I,' he says smilingly to the mirror, and then crosses the room and inspects the lock. Yes, locked. For added safety he pushes home the bolt, then checks that it is secure by turning the knob and trying to open the door. The door holds firm. Good, safe and sound. 'It's just the two of us now,' he says, and he gets into the disgustingly warm bed and smiles to ward off interruptions, though he has the sign hanging outside his door to protect him. He pulls the covers up to his chin, waggles his bare feet to feel how soft the sheets are, and gives another smile. Beds are not anti-Semitic.
He switches on his bedside lamp, picks up
Le Temps,
which is a window on the life from which he is excluded, and carefully avoids the society page and the diary of diplomatic receptions. But on every page his eye is drawn to ministers, generals, ambassadors. There are far too many ambassadors, there are ambassadors everywhere. Take a shot of veronal to blot out the crafty swine, canny hangers-on every man jack of them, former private secretaries who got where they are by licking the boots of gullible foreign ministers. He smiles, recalling that Naileater had said exactly the same thing about ambassadors he had encountered in the" pages of newspapers. Anyway, thirty years from now the whole crawling clique will all be dead. Yes, but in the meantime they are happy, they busy themselves with their supremely unimportant affairs, bustling, dynamic, telephoning, giving orders, ensuring that things are done which are almost immediately undone, forgetting that they will die.
He closes his eyes and tries to sleep. The telegram he'd sent yesterday must have set her mind at rest. Full of lies, saying his affairs are well on the way to being sorted out, that he'll be home soon. Leaning across to his bedside table, he opens the drawer again, takes out the packet with the sealing-wax on it, stares at it, and then puts it back. Not sleepy, the veronal hasn't worked. He gets up and inspects the room. Finger-marks on the wardrobe mirror. He rubs them with a handkerchief. Not very pretty, his unmade bed. Let's make it again properly, let's do it right, Jews together, with love. Pull the sheets smooth, and the blankets, tuck the ends in properly and straighten the counterpane, make it neat.
Having remade his bed, he looks for guidance in the mirror over the wash-basin. Staring at his bearded face, he feels at a loss, so he smiles to encourage cheerful thoughts which refuse to come. He washes his hands with soap and water, taking his time, to make time pass, to hook into hope by performing a trivial, everyday ritual. Next, he splashes himself with amber-coloured eau-de-Cologne to recapture the will to live, to give himself new heart. Poor Deume. Serves me right, I'm suffering too. He takes a penknife and scrapes the hard skin on the soles of his feet, scrupulously scrapes, and enjoys seeing the white flecks fall and build into a small heap. A meagre diversion. Best go out, walk about the streets. Yes, let's dip a toe into the social water. He sniggers; that way there are two of him.
Dressed now, he goes and says goodbye to himself in the mirror. The beard is appalling, makes him look like a convict. Can't be bothered to shave. They can hardly arrest him for having a beard. Anyway, the suit is Savile Row, which makes up for the beard. He opens the door and then shuts it hurriedly. What will the valet and the chambermaid think when they see that the bed has been made? Mustn't put their backs up. He hastily unmakes the bed, opens the door a few inches, and peers out. Nobody about in the corridor. He steps out and sets off, holding a handkerchief to his mouth as though he has toothache, his hat pulled well down to hide those awful, lustrous, betraying eyes. Ring for the lift? No, they stare at you more in lifts, because they are bored, on the lookout for anything to help pass the time. Fewer risks on the stairs. He runs down them, his unambiguous nose concealed by the handkerchief. He accelerates through the lobby with his eyes on the ground to avoid the danger of bumping into acquaintances from the old days.
In the Rue Marbeuf, spotting an inscription chalked on a wall, he walks past it, looking the other way. Best not to know. But, irresistibly drawn, he stops, turns and looks. Such large numbers of citizens in these love-thy-neighbour cities who wished death to the Jews. Perhaps whoever is asking for him to be put to death is a nice lad, a good son who buys flowers for his old mother. To avoid seeing any more walls, he walks into a brasserie. Hoping to catch snippets of conversation, he sits near a pleasant-looking old couple and orders a double whisky. Yes, look cheerful. He picks up the copy
of L'Illustration
lying on his table, opens it, and gives a start. No, they didn't say 'Jew', they said 'June'. The nice old man whispers something in the ear of his wife, who reacts with the unconcern which indicates that something is afoot and peers all round the room before letting her eyes settle on the well-dressed man with the" beard. She looks at her husband and gives him a wink of complicity, a knowing, hungry, colluding, foxy wink which sparkles with malice and cunning. 'Yes, of course,' she says, displaying two rows of crenellated teeth covered with green moss. He has been spotted. He gets up, leaves money on the table, and throws himself out, forgetting his whisky.
Through the streets he goes, those rivers which irrigate the parched Uves of the lonely, and as he goes he nibbles roasted peanuts bought from one of his own kind, an elderly Jew from Salonika with white, wavy hair and eyes as tender as any odalisque's, on he wanders, pausing from time to time outside the windows of dress shops, dipping into the bag of peanuts, dropping brown bits all over the ' lapels of his jacket, staring at the prettily painted wax dummies, so elegant, so obviously glad to be alive, so unremittingly delighted with life, then moving on, muttering under his breath, sometimes smiling to himself, going into shops and emerging with objects which will keep him company in his room, acquaintances to look at, to love.