Promise at Dawn, Page 4

  Yes, my mother had talent—and I have never recovered from it.

  And yet, the sinister Agroff, a moneylender who dwelt as befits the rat he was in a dark cellar in the Boulevard Gambetta, a flabby, greasy, white-faced individual from the shores of the Black Sea, upon meeting with some difficulties in collecting the ten per cent interest on the loan my mother had contracted in a moment of particularly dire financial stress, told me one day: “Your mother may play the great lady, but when I first knew her, she was singing in third-rate vodka joints and soldiers’ dives. That’s where she learned the language. I don’t feel insulted. A woman like that cannot insult an honest businessman.” Being only fourteen at the time, but already feeling able to do at least that much for my mother, I gave the honest businessman a resounding slap on his big snout, the first, as it happened, of many wildly distributed slaps for which I very soon became famous in the neighborhood, thus starting on a long and brilliant career in that field. For from then on, my mother, dazzled by my first noble exploit on her behalf, got into the habit of calling upon my newly-discovered talent whenever she decided, rightly or wrongly, that she had been insulted, invariably concluding her not always very accurate version of what had happened by saying:

  “He thinks I have nobody to protect me, that I can be insulted with impunity. Go and show him how wrong he is!”

  I always did. I had a horror of such scenes; moreover, I knew that nine times out of ten the insult was imaginary; that my mother was beginning to see insults everywhere, even though she was more often than not the insulting party, sometimes for no reason at all, simply because she was exhausted and her nerves got the best of her. But I played the game—I could do at least that for her. For so many years she had been fighting her own battles in every possible way, and now that she was aging rapidly, and her health was deteriorating, nothing delighted her more than to feel she had a protector by her side, a man to stand up for her. And so good manners be damned and my delicate feelings overboard! As my friend Albert Camus was to say years later in different circumstances: “If I have to choose between my mother and my ideas, I will choose my mother every time.” And so, taking my courage in both hands and gulping down my sense of shame, imposing on my childish features the toughest expression I could command, I proceeded forth-with to track down some unfortunate jeweler, butcher, tobacconist or antique dealer. This supposed offender then saw a boy, quivering with suppressed reluctance, enter his shop, plant himself in front of him with clenched fists, and say, in a voice trembling with anger and resentment of the role imposed on him by filial piety: “Monsieur, you have insulted my mother, and I’m going to teach you a lesson!”—this ritual pronouncement instantly followed by a slap in the face, into which I put all my strength, to compensate for my lack of conviction. Thus I soon acquired in the neighborhood of the Boulevard Gambetta and the Marché de la Buffa the reputation of a young hoodlum, and no one suspected how much I loathed these scenes, how deeply they hurt and humiliated me. If some of my victims, or their children, happen to read these pages, I beg their forgiveness, and I wish to assure them that their sense of injury was more than matched by my own; I repeat that I had no choice; my hooliganism was a labor of love; my helplessness can be fully understood only by those who have grown strong through the toil of a sick and aging mother. Once or twice, knowing her complaint to be wholly unjustified, I tried to revolt. Whenever this happened, tears came into her eyes, her mouth sagged, and an expression of such total defeat came over her face that I rose in silence and went off to my dubious battle on her behalf.

  I have never been able to endure the sight of a living creature in the grip of what I can only call a lucid incomprehension of its fate. I have never been able to tolerate the sight of helplessness in man or beast, and in her attitudes my mother had a rare gift for assuming what is most heartbreaking in both. And so Agroff had scarcely stopped speaking when the resounding slap hit him on the cheek, followed by another, for symmetry’s sake, to which his only reply was a black look, and: “Hooligan! Just what I’d expect from the offspring of an adventuress and a cad.” It was in this sudden and unexpected way that the truth about my interesting origins was revealed to me. Not that the news in the least impressed me, since I attached no importance whatsoever to my past or present; all that mattered was that I knew myself destined to reach those dizzy heights so clearly visible to my mother’s eyes; nothing on earth could prevent me from reaching them for her sake. I had always known that my mission on earth was one of retribution; that I existed, as it were, only by proxy; that the mysterious force presiding over our destiny had cast me onto the scale so as to balance by the weight of my achievement my mother’s life of toil, loneliness and sacrifice. I believed that in life’s darkest crannies there lay concealed a secret, smiling, and compassionate logic; that justice always triumphed in the end; I believed deeply in all those clichés that had for centuries assured man’s survival on this earth; I could not see a look of total helplessness on my mother’s face without feeling surging within me an extraordinary confidence in my destiny. At the darkest moments of the war, in the thick of the battle, I always faced peril with a feeling of invincibility. Nothing could happen to me because I was her happy ending. In that system of weights and measures which men try so desperately to impose upon the universe, I always saw myself as her victory.

  This conviction did not come to me by chance. It was but a reflection of the faith which my mother had since his earliest childhood placed in her son. I was, I think, eight years old when my mother’s grandiose vision of my future led to a scene the horror, comedy, and shame of which will continue to haunt me as long as I live.

  CHAPTER 6

  We were stranded at that time in the then Polish, formerly Lithuanian, and now Russian town of Vilna, “a temporary halt,” as my mother never failed to point out, on our way to France, a country where we were to make our permanent home, which was eagerly awaiting me, and where I was to “grow up, study, and become somebody.” This last word was always underlined and accompanied by a particularly meaningful stare. With the usual inventiveness and energy she showed whenever our survival was at stake, and without any previous experience in the field, she was busily engaged in designing women’s hats in our flat, haughtily publicized through the mail and display cards as the “Grand Salon de Modes de Paris.” A clever use of false labels tricked our distinguished clientele into believing that the hats were the work of a then famous Parisian king of fashion, Paul Poiret. My mother went from house to house with her hatboxes, a woman still young, with large green eyes and a face radiant with a mother’s indomitable will, entirely beyond the reach of discouragement or doubt. I remained at home with Aniela, who had followed us from Moscow a year earlier. The last of our family jewels—real ones, this time—had been long gone, and the winter was bitterly cold in Vilna, where the snow slowly piled up on the wooden sidewalks against the dirty gray walls. The hats were selling badly. Often, when my mother returned exhausted and frozen from her rounds, the owner of the building would be waiting for her on the stairs and shout at her. threatening to throw us into the street if the rent wasn’t paid within twenty-four hours. It was always paid, though how I shall never know. All I can say is that the rent was always paid, the stove lit, tea, bread, butter and eggs were put before me, and my mother would kiss me, her cheeks still icy and smelling of snow, and then look at me, her eyes aglow with that bright flame of pride and triumph which I so well remember. We were then truly at the very bottom—I won’t say at the bottom of the “abyss” because I have since learned that the abyss is bottomless and that all records of falling and sinking can be broken there without ever exhausting the possibilities of that interesting institution. Often, when she had come back from her expeditions through the snow-blanketed town, and had stacked her hatboxes in a corner, my mother would sit down, light a cigarette, cross her legs and look at me with a knowing smile.

  “What is it, Mother?”

  “Nothing. Give me a kiss.�
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  I would kiss her. She held me in her arms, her eyes fixed over my shoulder on some mysterious, bright point in our future, visible only to her in the magical land where all the beauty lies.

  “You are going to be a French ambassador,” she would say, or rather state, with absolute conviction; I had not the slightest idea what the word meant, but that did not in the least keep me from agreeing with her. I was only eight, but I had already made up my mind: whatever my mother wanted I would accomplish for her—there was absolutely nothing that I would let stand in the way.

  “You are going to be a French ambassador.”

  “Good,” I would say with a nonchalant air.

  Aniela, sitting close to the stove, gave me a respectful look, while my mother wiped her tears of happiness and hugged me tight.

  “You will have a motorcar.”

  She had been walking the streets all day, with the temperature well below freezing.

  “All it will take is a little patience.”

  The wood was crackling in the porcelain stove. Outside, the snow gave the world a strange denseness, and a dimension of silence which the bell of an occasional sleigh seemed to intensify. Aniela, bent over her work, was sewing another forged PAUL POIRET, MADE IN PARIS label into the last of the day’s hats. My mother’s face was completely peaceful. All traces of fatigue and anxiety had vanished. Her gaze was still lost in the land of all marvels, and so compelling was her stare, and so convincing her smile, that, in spite of myself, I turned my head in that direction, as I almost always did, trying to catch at least a glimpse of what she was seeing. She spoke to me of France as other mothers speak to their children of Snow White and Puss in Boots. Try as I may, I have never entirely succeeded in ridding myself of that image of France seen as a never-never land of shining heroes and exemplary virtues. I am probably one of the few men alive who have remained completely loyal to a nursery tale.

  Unfortunately my mother was not the woman to keep to herself the consoling dream of my future greatness which dwelt within her. Everything with her was instantly proclaimed, spoken aloud, trumpeted abroad, announced to all, projected over the heads of the incredulous populace, more often than not to the accompaniment of lava, stones and thunder.

  We had neighbors, and those neighbors did not like my mother. The petite bourgeoisie of Vilna was just as stupid and prejudiced as it is everywhere, and the comings and goings of this foreigner in the black leather coat, with her mysterious boxes, were soon reported to the Polish police, who were then extremely suspicious of Russian refugees. My mother was denounced as a receiver of stolen goods. She had no difficulty in confounding her detractors, but shame, grief, and indignation assumed, as always with her, an explosive and aggressive character. After the police had left she spent some time crying among her hats—women’s hats have since remained one of my smaller phobias—then she took me by the hand, and, announcing to Aniela that “they don’t know whom they are dealing with, but they’ll soon find out,” led me out of the flat onto the stairs. What followed was one of the most painful experiences of my life—and I have known quite a few.

  She went from door to door, ringing, knocking, and ordering the tenants to “crawl out of their holes.” When the first insults had been exchanged—and in the matter of insults my mother always and undeniably had the best of it—she drew me to her side, and, exhibiting me with a noble theatrical gesture to the assembled company, announced with pride and vehemence, in a voice which still resounds with an uncanny clarity in my ears:

  “Dirty little bourgeois bedbugs, you don’t seem to realize with whom you have the honor of speaking! My son will be an Ambassador of France, a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, a great dramatic author, a second Ibsen, a new Gabriele d’Annunzio. . . . He . . .”

  She was searching her mind for something crashingly final, for a supreme and unanswerable proof of worldly success and supreme achievement: “He will have his suits made in London!”

  Even as my hand writes these words I can hear the loud, coarse laughter of the “dirty bourgeois bedbugs.”

  The blood still rushes to my cheeks, and I can remember every wounding word they spat at us, and I see around me their stupid, mocking faces, so superior, so full of hatred and contempt. I know today that they were just ordinary human faces, full of ordinary hatred and contempt, such as one meets with every day. But I was only a child then—I didn’t know, and they appeared horrible to me. And perhaps I shall be allowed to say, for the clarity of this tale, and comical as it may sound, I am today a Consul General of France, an officer of the Legion of Honor, and if I failed to become either an Ibsen or a d’Annunzio, the world knows my name, and if you wish you can laugh at me for saying this—you are welcome to: I am long past any fear of ridicule, and anyway, I am writing this for those who have a heart.

  And make no mistake about it: I have my suits made in London. I have a strong dislike of the English “cut,” but I have no choice.

  I believe that nothing has played a more important part in my life than the burst of laughter flung in my face on the staircase of an old block of flats at Number 16, Grand Pohulanka in the town of Vilna. To it I owe everything I am today. For better or worse, that laughter has become me.

  My mother stood there straight and proud, facing the storm, pressing me against her with both arms, her head held high. She showed no trace of embarrassment or humiliation. She knew. My life in the weeks that followed was not very pleasant. Though I was only eight, my sense of ridicule was highly developed—my mother, naturally, had something to do with that. But I have gradually come to terms with it. Slowly but surely I have learned how to lose my pants in public without feeling in the least embarrassed. I have learned that a man is something that cannot be ridiculed.

  But during those few terrible minutes on the stairs, under the jibes, the crushing comments and the insults, I felt that my breast had become a cage from which an animal in the grip of pain and panic was desperately trying to escape.

  There was, at that time, a woodshed in the courtyard of our block, and my favorite hiding place was at the very heart of the pile of logs. I felt marvelously secure when, after much expert and acrobatic wriggling—the stacks of wood were two floors high—I had succeeded in working my way inside it, protected from the world by walls of damp, sweet-smelling timber. I spent long hours in my secret kingdom, completely happy, out of reach. Parents strictly forbade their children to go near that fragile and menacing structure: one disturbed log, one accidental push, and the whole thing might come crashing down and bury one inside of it. I had acquired a high degree of skill in worming my way along the narrow passage of this universe over which I ruled as lord and master, where a single false move would provoke an avalanche, but where I felt at home. By cunningly shifting the logs I had constructed a whole maze of galleries and secret passages, a system of burrows, a safe and friendly world, so different from the other, into which I slithered like a ferret. I would lie hidden there in spite of the dampness which would gradually soak the bottom of my pants. I knew exactly which logs to move when I wanted to open a passage, and always carefully replaced them behind me so as to increase still more my feeling of inaccessibility.

  And so I made straight for my wooden hide-out as soon as I could do so decently—that is, without giving the impression that I was abandoning my mother and leaving her to face the enemy alone. We remained together on the battlefield until the end and were the last to withdraw.