Public Enemies (12 page)

By chance I had dinner the other evening with a great judge, Philippe Courroye. You would need to know the history of my relations with him to understand. I would need to tell you about that morning five years ago when he interrogated me for hours about a financial misdemeanor. Thank heavens I hadn’t committed it, but only a literary argument, a purely literary argument, managed to convince him that I was telling the truth. Next time, maybe. In a future letter, if it comes up and especially if I’m allowed to (I’m not sure about that, to tell the truth). But what I want to tell you here is that he spoke to me the other night about a recent case, very recent, which he came across in his role of public prosecutor in Nanterre. A man had received a heavy sentence. The matter appeared to be classified as ultrasensitive. The formidable Courroye, on examining the file, finds that it’s not that clear, that this man was a simple soul, a Pierre Rivière
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without the
madness, and that he might have confessed to a crime he hadn’t committed. And the reactions of the colleagues Courroye asked to check, reinvestigate, possibly rejudge were inertia, apathy, the unwillingness of a machine that does not at any cost want to be challenged. Over a century later this is the same tune, the same story, the same distant but distinct echo of the mechanism of the Dreyfus affair, still this same “better an injustice than disorder.”

Courroye is certainly not a representative of the moralizing left you mention.

We certainly do not belong to the same part of the ideological and political spectrum.

But in this case, he was the one who was right.

When I left him, I said to myself—and I repeated it when I read your letter—that fortunately there are people within the institution who take the view that there can be no order worthy of the name if it is nourished by injustice.

In short, that line is detestable.

Even outside the courts, it’s a line that gets around, and everywhere it goes, it injects its poison.

It’s the line that springs to mind when you don’t want to bother with the destiny of a small people whose martyrdom doesn’t have even a butterfly effect on the workings of the planet.

It’s the phrase muttered to themselves by those bastards when you ask them to take sides with a handful of Tibetan monks—oh yes, those Tibetans! Not always such pure spirits as the Dalai Lama, ready for the mystical experience of having their body sliced through by a train—who are in the middle of screwing up their little diplomatic games.

It’s the typical line of someone who knows, on the one hand, that there’s injustice in Tibet and, on the other, that there will be a great disorder if we annoy the Chinese and
they decide to punish us by selling their dollar reserves and not flying to the aid of Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers.

It’s the phrase that would have occurred to the neighbors across the way from Family X, arrested one morning in July 1942 by the national police, by order of the Gestapo. What does one Jewish family matter? Isn’t France already in enough trouble as it is? Aren’t the French police, led by the valiant Bousquet and Papon,
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going through hell to save anyone they can and give blankets to children? And frankly, is it really the moment to cause an almighty scandal, such disorder, because of some local injustice?

It’s a line that kills, it’s the most odious line of all time.

I don’t wish to offend you. I’m just saying what I feel. It’s a line that makes my blood run cold, and it distresses me to think that you seem to have made it your own, without giving it a second thought and moreover assuming—I wonder why exactly—that our contemporaries are likely to take your side …

I’ll go further.

Or perhaps not so far—I don’t know.

You may think that I’m overreacting, that I’m making this too personal and that this weakens my argument. But too bad, after what you threw out at me, I must be allowed to cross the line.

This sentence in itself turns my blood cold.

But it also turns my blood cold on a more personal level.

And I’ll even say that if it turns my blood cold, if I find it physically unbearable to read it in general and particularly
when written by you, that’s because it resonates in me with obscure fears, irrational terrors, threats that are difficult to formulate and probably childish, ghosts. It’s because—I’m going to say it straight out—part of me has always believed that one day that phrase could apply to me.

There are things like that, that you just know.

For example, I have the impression that I more or less know what the last book I’ll write will be and even the last one I’ll read.

I have a vague idea—I’ve always had one—about some of the appointments I still have to honor.

And this is the same. This may seem very silly but I’ve always felt that the day might come, I don’t know when or where, how, in what context, whether literary, judicial, political, revolutionary, where I might hear, “An injustice for Lévy? A serious injustice? Very serious? Well, he went looking for it. He shouldn’t have been such a show-off. In any case, better that injustice—a thousand times better—than disorder in the world!” And I know that the phrase will sound so fair, so obvious and reasonable, that there will be no one to protest, to contest it, to petition or rebel against it.

It’s the story (which has haunted me since I first read the book in the summer of 1968 at Antibes) of Solal in Chapter 5 of Albert Cohen’s
Belle du Seigneur
, alone in his cave in Berlin with the dwarf Rachel, exiled by the League of Nations, stripped of his honors, abandoned by everyone, condemned.

It’s the last words of Emmanuel Levinas’s
Proper Names
(I don’t have my books with me either, as I’m writing this time from Salvador da Bahia in Brazil, and I don’t even have the Internet)—it’s that last, lugubrious page, in which Levinas evokes the naïveté of one of those who used to be called French Jews: sure of himself and his place in this world, cosseted,
rich in talents and titles, surrounded by friends, possibly powerful. But then overnight, without warning, an icy wind blows through the rooms in his house, the tapestries and drapes are torn from the walls, all the poor glories of his life are swept away like rags, and in the distance he hears the screeching of a pitiless crowd.

In fact, it’s the story of Alfred III, the grocer in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s
The Visit
. I suppose you know Dürrenmatt? If you don’t, get to know him at once. He’s not much worse than Goethe. He wrote that brilliant text, which has also haunted me for twenty years and tells the story of an “old lady” who as a child lived in Güllen, a small town that used to be wealthy and is now ruined and that Goethe, no less, is supposed to have visited once. She left Güllen and made her fortune elsewhere. She returns as a total show-off, broadcasting her success as the town’s prodigal daughter. After a few days of psychological preparation, as shifty as it is intense, she announces to her former fellow citizens, “You remember Clara, the mason’s daughter, who was in love with Alfred but was abandoned by him when she became pregnant? She went through hell, that little Clara. She snuck off like a thief, fleeing the insults of those who mocked her red braids and her advanced pregnancy. Well, I’m Clara. I’ve come back to avenge myself and at the same time to save my town, as you’re about to go under, aren’t you? Your factories have closed. Your young people are unemployed. Don’t worry, citizens and friends. I’m offering fifty billion plus another fifty billion to share among yourselves. All I ask in return is one thing, the head of the man who dumped me and whom you must kill.” Naturally, the village cries out, “That’s blackmail, outrageous. Have you ever heard of honest citizens, respectful of the spirit of justice, agreeing to such a transaction?” The old lady smiles in a corner and replies, “That’s all it will take. I’ll wait.
When you change your mind, I’ll be there with my valets, my eighth husband, my chambermaids, my trunks, and my billions, at the Inn of the Golden Apostle, near the railway station.” And indeed it doesn’t take her long to get her result. It begins with an epidemic of new yellow shoes that invade the town, then dresses for the young girls, colorful shirts for the boys. To his surprise, Alfred notices that the police officer he turns to when he notices the grim way people are staring at him is sporting a magnificent gold tooth. The curate who gives him refuge has received a new bell for his church. Everyone gets televisions and washing machines. Unlimited supplies of pilsner. Prosperity at all levels. You get the point. As the old lady predicted, the entire village has begun, just begun, to let itself be bought. “That Alfred, after all … Isn’t the old woman somewhat right? Didn’t he behave like a swine at the time? And even today. Look at him even today. First off, he’s an ugly bastard, we never realized what an ugly, two-faced look he had … And then, doesn’t he understand the awful situation the town is in? He was there the other day when she made her proposal. He understood just as we did that all that was needed was a word from him, a gesture, for our prosperity to return and Forge X and Mill Y to be saved. Of course we acted indignant; it was a question of principle. But what about him? Why didn’t he make the gesture? Why does he not sacrifice himself for this city, which he says he loves? He says it’s unjust, that it would be an injustice to give in to that old lunatic’s caprice. But where does the injustice lie, I wonder. Can you really talk about injustice when a whole community can be saved? What an egotist. What a bad lot. And what fools we are to be so kind.” I’m not so sure of the details. But that’s how it goes, in general. And there’s poor Alfred in the last scene, assassinated in a corner
of his grocery store, shabbily strangled, while, as the price for this small injustice, happy order returns to Güllen.

I know writers who identify with Céline, Proust, Paul Morand, Drieu, Montherlant, Romain Gary.

I even have a friend, not a bad writer, who, when he’s not feeling well, declaims in front of his mirror the “Ode à Jean Moulin” by André Malraux.

But on my good days it’s Solal I think of, in his cave, abandoned by everyone except his dwarf.

On the bad ones I’m haunted by the destiny of Dürrenmatt’s grocer, not a real bastard, not entirely innocent, assassinated by a crowd of his fellow men.

At times I also think of the story (a true one in this case, and it has pursued me since it was revealed a dozen years ago by a Swiss historian) of Marc Bloch, whose “great friend” Lucien Febvre implored him to give in to the Germans, who were asking for just one thing, one small thing, to authorize the republication of the journal
Annales
,
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and to consent to having his name removed from the journal’s list of contributors. What? Febvre grew impatient. Bloch was hesitating, complaining? Weighing the pros and cons, moralizing, flaunting his high principles, quibbling? What selfishness! What an inflated ego! What a lack of any sense of or concern for the common good! Naturally, Bloch eventually gave in. But what prevarication, what complications before finally going over to the only worthwhile view. What a prick.

I repeat that all this makes no sense.

It’s almost unseemly to identify with Marc Bloch, who was ultimately executed by the Nazis.

And I authorize you to object that there is something about these ghosts that tends to undermine what I told you the last time about my inability to experience and see myself as a victim.

But that’s how it is. I suppose we’re all entitled to our little contradictions. Moreover, in my defense I’d say that there is my daytime thinking, my conscious, everyday life, where being a victim has no place, and then there’s my other, nocturnal life, not usually acknowledged, where I’m less proud and endlessly vulnerable.

In any case, that’s the truth.

This is my primal and secret scene, my obsession, my nightmare.

And that was my fifteen minutes of being pathetic or paranoid, as you will.