The Avignon Quintet (121 page)

“But where are we going?” she asked in a low voice full of concern. “We seem so linked now. I have changed so much in such a short time.”

“It’s only the beginning – that’s why I hesitated so much. I did not want to go away as I must soon.”

So, inchmeal, their love advanced.

And yet there was some inward check, for from time to time there would be moments of abstraction when she discerned an expression of tremendous sadness on his face; he might stand staring at the lake, or simply transfixed before the mirror in which he was knotting a tie, while this shadow of immense distress settled upon his features – it needed an effort to shake off. Then it was replaced by the look of loving wonder which he always wore when looking at her, talking to her. But she was alarmed by this sudden change and once, surprising it as she awoke (he stood by the balcony gazing down at the water) she cried out, “What
is
it that comes over you, comes between us all of a sudden? You must tell me. Is it someone else?” He laughed, and came to sit on the foot of the bed. “Yes, I must tell you because it concerns us both in the long run – it’s aimed at us. Yet it’s so fantastic that it is hard to realise, its novelty is so unexpected. Constance, I have been to Canada and I have seen the thing – what they call the Toy: the bomb, the new one.” He fell silent for a long moment, staring at the pattern in the carpet.

He had visited the smithy of Haephaestus so to speak, the flaring forges where the huge grenades of the atomic piles roared and shivered, as if about to give birth, while the boiling steam and water rushed from the sluices and filled the air with dense acrid warmth; and outside the vast snowscapes like another inclement Russia, snow falling in the quarries with their long caterpillar-lines of linked chariots. He shivered in his soul when he remembered those shivering and sweating grenades full of a new fever.

“I had to report on this to the small group of Alexandrian searchers to which I belong and which I sometimes direct. I won’t bore you with all that. But what I saw – my dear, all that is going on now, the fighting taking place, is already as out of date as the Battle of Hastings. We are fighting with bows and arrows. Compared to what has already arrived, the Toy.”

“I had heard some vague talk about it from a patient who was a Viennese mathematician.”

“It’s not the war that’s at issue. This thing is aimed at our bone marrow, and the bone marrow of the earth we live on. It confers sterility or genetic distortion – we will be born without heads and legs like illustrations to the propositions of Empedocles. Constance, nature has lost all interest in us; from now we are orphans! And how appropriate that a Jew should have triggered this murderous extract of pure matter, what a terrible revenge of the Semitic brain – a really Faustian denouement awaits us; it completely dwarfs the war, what matter who wins or loses? It is a shadow-play, for both sides are orphaned by the same stroke.” He was trembling so much that she took his hands in her own strong ones and succeeded in calming him without speaking. “Not only that,” he went on at last on a quieter note, “as if that were not enough – woman is compromised; in her we are destroying our nurse and muse, the earth.”

They sat for a long time, as if posed for a photograph, she with her head against his shoulder, he with his arms round her shoulders. “You see what comes between our kisses?” he whispered at last, stroking her attentive and beautiful face. “When man starts to
feel
with his reason, with his intelligence, why, Monsieur is there!”

“Monsieur what? Monsieur who?” she asked.

And then, “We are being too serious,” he said all of a sudden, briskly, shaking off the enormous weight of this ugly daydream, and at the same time feeling absolved because he had told her, had spoken it all aloud; at last there was someone to whom he could really talk. As she was putting on her clothes she said thoughtfully, “There must be a strategy for being happy. It’s our duty to find it!” How like a woman, he thought.

“No such thing,” he said.

She found some of his thinking interesting, but some downright silly. “How like a man,” she said, “you are just feeling out of your depth, that is all; the new polyandry has scared you. But honey, the woman was always free, though not always allowed to say so openly. Is it a bad thing to come clean? She can now indulge her always dream of being an unpaid prostitute of pure benevolence, a public benefactor. She has become a collector – seven men to one woman seems about right – I have worked this out from what my patients have told me. Farmyard mathematics!”

“It doesn’t work,” he said. “Would that it did!”

“I know. But why not after all?”

“Because the poor quality of the male sperm becomes at once felt by the woman who is now the assailant. Anxiety and poor erections set in.
Ejaculatio praecox!
The poor little vagina must be likened to a little animal always eager for its nourishment. The sperm literally feeds it, it bathes the walls with their mucous membranes, it permeates the whole flesh and psyche. You can taste the odour of male sperm on the breath. The vagina starts to die of inanition, to falter from hunger; a hundred men with inferior sperm cannot feed it. In the gnostic sense a sperm which is poor in oxygen is deficient in the needed nourishment; it is poorly documented, poor in oxygen and the fruits of thought.”

“Go on,” she said, for it seemed a new and unusual way of looking at the sexual act, at the economy of the whole transaction. But he had turned quizzical now, as if he did not for a moment expect her to believe his theories. Smiling, however, he went on with his exposition: “The walls of the little animal – prettier often than the mouth of its owner – gives out a replete hum when the quality of the sperm is high or well-documented as we say: like a beehive or a small dynamo or a cat purring. The possibility of making a strong child with rich brain content and powerful sexuality presents itself and is eagerly welcomed by both lovers in their psyches. But with poor-quality sperm the poor little animal becomes parched and withered; sperm with no spiritual axis cannot feed the woman’s ideas or her feelings. The more she performs the more diminished she feels. Genetically she is being starved, her ideas become poor and exhausted, the joy of living deserts her. And then comes the last stage.” He put on a story-book voice and wagged a cautionary finger at her as he said, with great assurance. “Guess what?
Nymphomania!
” She clapped her hands at this revelation. “The girls begin to scratch themselves to death; the men find that they cannot achieve a climax easily – even younger men. Their hair recedes. They go into politics …”

“Or come to the analyst. I have restored the hair to two tired men, and have heard of analysis unblocking the sex drive. But you must know that. Where did you pick up your psychological knowledge?”

“Here and there. But I went to a woman and she could not resist my honesty – she fell in love with me.”

“And?”

“And!”

He took her hand and put it to his cheek. “Your life is full of hazards because as yet your science is inexact. She went mad and was locked up: she writes to me, long, long letters of self-reproach for having loved me. Yet there was nothing between us of a personal sort – it all went on in her head!”

“Love! It’s all done by mirrors!”

“Exactly. But I don’t care. I invest! I love you!”

“Prove it.”

He shook his head. “We are living out the death of the couple, the basic brick of all culture.”

“You are out of date and out of focus,” she said.

“Out of date and out of fashion, rather,” he admitted.

She said: “It’s all going too fast; you understand too much; I shall use you up too soon. I had imagined this relationship being slow, full of hesitations and nuances and unwitting naivetés. I wanted to build it slowly, match by match, like a ship in a publican’s bottle.”

He: “I thought you were too beautiful to be really clever.”

“You are not against me because I am a Freudian and a doctor? I was scared to death that it might make a sort of shadow between us – that I knew too much to be sufficiently feminine to appease you, to get my hooks into you: but it’s been so easy sliding downhill,
en pente douce
. I have forgotten how to brake.”

“It’s a sign of our intellectual abjectness that psychology with its miserly physical categories and positivist bias should prove liberating and enriching as it does; it proves that the psyche is seriously ankylosed by the rigour of our
moeurs
. The real seed of the neurosis is the belief in the discrete ego; as fast as you cure ’em the contemporary metaphysic which is Judeo-Christianity manufactures more I’s to become sick Me’s. On my word as a Professor!”

“O Lord! you
are
anti-Freudian after all.”

“No. I revere him, I even revere the purity of his unshakeable belief in scientific reason. His discovery was as important as the microscope, or the petrol engine, a sudden enlarging of our field of vision. How
could
one not admire it?”

“Okay. I forgive you. But there is one thing most aggravating about you – I’d better tell you now, right at the beginning, instead of waiting until we are divorced …”

“Well?”

“You talk as if you had some privileged information which is not accessible to me. It’s typically masculine and it makes one inclined to sympathise with the heavy brigade – as we call the clitoris club in the clinic.”

“It’s a serious charge.”

“Have you?”

“No.”

TEN

The General

T
HE MISADVENTURE WHICH VIRTUALLY COST VON ESSLIN
his sight was also, by a paradox, instrumental in saving his life, for it supervened at about the time when the tide had turned and hostilities in and around his Provençal stronghold were sharpening to a climax. It resulted in his being incarcerated in an eye clinic near Nîmes, there to lie in sombre darkness with a pad over his eyes, drowned in self-reproaches and self-questionings. Whatever his body decreed, his soldier’s mind was still on the active list, and the little radio by the bed brought him no consoling news, though the bulletins were under heavy censorship. Heaven knew how much was left unsaid. But truth to tell, his own decline had been going on for some time, for a year or more; this sudden flurry of a buildup involving so many new officers and material had only emphasised a fatigue which had slowly been gaining on him since the Avignon command had first become his. Though not unduly introspective he found himself often wondering about the cause. It was not only the calamitous withdrawal from Russia which could hardly be disguised any longer, nor the failure in Egypt and Italy, no. It was the inability to speak openly about them, and thus to devise ways and means to stem the tide until they could re-form their ranks. He did not believe the war lost, but still under debate, while there was plenty of life in the old German war dog yet to redress the failures of the past and assure future victory. But in other times the subject would have been discussed and ventilated, there would have been great conferences of strategists, self-criticism, truthful, intelligent assessments of the situation. But in this case one could not voice a single criticism that did not touch the question of the Leader’s good faith, good judgement; what was at stake was quite literally the divinity of the Führer – who dared to gainsay that?

And then … Von Esslin had aged, he felt the gradually lengthening shadows of a change of life start spreading before him; his reactions were slower. The younger officers grew impatient with the timidity of his troops’ dispositions and felt that the three lateral rivers had begun to obsess him. In the fortress, standing in front of the great European chart with its interlapping sections, he still held forth, terminating his discourse with the old, once dramatic gesture of placing his thumb upon Avignon and spreading his fingers to turn them in a slow arc to show the extent of their strategic coverage – the gateway to Italy and the Côte d’Azur were both comprised in this expository gesture. The thought of a landing further north was a novelty which he did not take into account: others would deal with such an eventuality. But the numbers needed close supervision, things had become very crowded, not only because of the wounded from the Russian front but also because of the hordes of slave-workers or volunteer Fascists of all nationalities, even Russian, who were tunnelling the vast underground corridors of the new dumps under the Pont du Gard. He had vague thoughts about his retirement in a few years, of what he would do with himself; but here a thrill of incertitude swept his mind. What sort of world would he retire into? In order to call himself to order and replenish his morale he commenced a close study of the Protocols of Zion and the Imperial Testament of Peter, the documents he carried with him always in their little plastic envelope. It calmed and even invigorated his mind, this regular study every evening. But he felt rather cut off and a trifle moribund as he contemplated the impatient energy of the younger officers, and so often read on their faces expressions of a smiling condescension when he was talking. He was annoyed to discover that he had been accorded the nickname of “Grandfather” by the command. It only emphasised the gulf which was spreading between two generations, two historic attitudes. He began to drink rather heavily.