Castle to Castle (20 page)

Bichelonne had the biggest head of us all . . . not only a champion of Polytechnique and the École des Mines . . . History! Geotechnics! . . . He was an electronic brain! He had to tell us the which and the why! explain the crotchets of the Castle! every last one! did he know why it leaned south rather than north? . . . why those ramshackle chimneys, those wormeaten battlements and drawbridges leaned more to the west? . . . that goddam cradle of the Hohenzollerns! perched on its rock . . . out of kilter! lopsided all over . . . inside, outside! every room and passageway . . . the whole business! all ready to topple into the water for the last fourteen centuries! . . . go see for yourself . . . cradle and den of the worst pack of rapacious wolves in Europe! some Shrine! and believe me it wobbled under the squadrons, the thousands and thousands of Flying Fortresses bound for Dresden, Munich, Augsburg . . . by day and by night . . . all the little stained-glass windows cracked and fell in the river . . . you'll see!

All the same, this castle of Siegmaringen, this whole fantastic lopsided chunk of trompe-l'oeil managed to hold out for thirteen . . . fourteen centuries . . . Bichelonne didn't hold out at all . . . graduate of Polytechnique, minister, amazing mind . . . he died at Hohenlychen in East Prussia . . . pure coquetry . . . lunacy . . . went up there to be operated, have a fracture fixed . . He had visions of himself going back to Paris on the double beside Laval, triumphant . . . Arch of Triumph, Champs-Elysées, the Unknown Soldier . . . he was obsessed by his leg . . . it doesn't bother him anymore . . . the way they operated on him up there at Hohenlychen, I'll tell you about it . . . the witnesses have gone out of existence . . . so has the surgeon . . . Gebhardt, war criminal, hanged! . . . not for the way he operated on Bichelonne! . . . for all sorts of genocides, little intimate Hiroshimas . . .oh, not that Hiroshima makes me flip! . . . look at Truman, how happy he is, pleased with himself, playing the harpsichord . . . the idol of millions of voters! . . . the widower of millions of widows' dreams! . . . Cosmic Landru! . . . playing Amadeus' harpsichord . . . just wait a while . . . kill a lot of people and wait . . . that does it . . . not just Denoël! . . . Marion . . . Bichelonne . . . Beria . . . tomorrow B. . . . K. . . . H! The line forms to the right . . . shaking, stamping . . . yelling to get in . . . to be hanged quicker and shorter . . . roasted to a crisp . . . the whole National Assembly, the six hundred . . . listen to them, the state they're in, their impatience to be fed to the lions!

We 1,142 had other things to do beside looking at the landscape . . . we had to find our daily bread . . . myself, I've got to admit, I can get along on very little, but there, same as later in the north, we were really starving, not temporarily for the diet, no, this was serious . . .

All pretty miscellaneous! I read it over . . . How can I expect you to understand all this . . . not to lose the thread . . . my humblest apologies! . . . If my voice wavers, if I jibber-jabber, I'm no worse than most guides . . . you'll forgive me when you know the whole story . . . definitely! . . . so bear with me . . . I'm lying here . . . making my bed quake . . . all for you . . . getting my memories together . . . I need the fever to boil me up . . . to put the details in place . . . and the dates . . . I don't want to mislead you . . .

In that teetering lopsided barn . . . twenty manor houses one on top of the other . . . there was a library . . . that was really something . . . a treasure . . . amazing . . . well come back to that, I'll tell you . . .

For a while the 1,142 . . . Leclerc's army is coming closer . . . closer . . . were shaken with worry . . . with a desire to know more . . . more and more especially the intellectuals . . . and we had our quota of intellectuals in Siegmaringen . . . real cerebral types, serious . . . like Gaxotte could almost have been . . . none of your sad sacks from the café terraces, ambitious alcoholics, mental defectives with an idea now and then, squinting from charm to charm, from urinal to urinal Slavs, Hungarians, Yankees, Mings, from commitment to commitment, from one Mauriaco-Tarterie to the next, from cross to sickle, from pernod to pernod, from coat to coat, from envelope to envelope . . . no, nothing in common! . . . all really serious intellectuals! . . . not the gratuitous, verbal kind . . . but ready to pay and paying . . . with Article 75 on their ass! . . . real lamppost fodder . . . flawless intellectuals . . . dying of hunger, cold, and scabies . . . Well, they were anxious to know if ever, down through the ages . . . there had ever been a clique, a caste, a gang as hated, as cursed as us, as furiously expected and searched for by hordes of cops (ah, lily-livered Hungarians!) to stick banderillas in us, fry us, or impale us . . .

It took a lot of research . . . and I can assure you that our intellectuals investigated . . . all the lousy stinking bastards that had been tortured in one place or another . . . Spartacists . . . Girondins . . . Templars . . . Communes . . . We examined all the Chronicles, Codes, Libels . . . we weighed and sifted . . . we compared . . . were we . . . could we be . . . as stinking . . . as fit to throw on the dump, to spit on pitchforks, as Napoleon's friends? . . . after they'd shipped him to St. Helena . . . were we? . . . Especially his Spanish friends . . . the hidalgo collaborationists! . . . the Josefins! Good name to remember! . . . that's what we were . . .
Adolfins
! . . . the
Josefins
got theirs all right . . . all the Javerts° of the day on their ass! Practically the same hue and cry . . . as us, the 1,142 . . . with Leclerc's army in Strasbourg . . . and its chop-chop Senegalese! . . . (and the Hungarians complaining about the Tartars . . . Christ!)

Which shows you that that imperial library was rich, rich in everything . . . amazing what you could find there . . . fertilize your mind in every field . . . manuscripts, memoirs, incunabula . . . you should have seen our intellectuals climbing up ladders, Ph.D.'s, Academicians, graduates of the École Normale, all ages, expelled Immortals, rummaging through all that . . . ardent! feverish! . . . Latin, Greek, French . . . that was culture . . . and scratching their itch at the same time . . . on top of every ladder . . . and each one wanting to be right . . . each standing by his manuscript . . . his chronicle . . .. that we were more hated or less than Joseph's collaborators . . . that the price on our heads was higher . . . or lower? . . . in francs . . . or in the escudos of the period . . . a Dean of the Faculty of Law inclined to "more" . . . an Immortal to "less" . . . We voted: fifty-fifty! The future is in the hands of God! Hell! The Immortal was way off! The events have proved that . . . the calvary of the
Adolfins
was infinitely more ferocious than all the other vengeances end to end! as sensational as the H-bomb! . . . a hundred thousand times more powerful than our piddling shells of '14! Super-hunt! sensational kill and forever . . . none of us will ever see the end of it! . . . Saint Louis, the bum . . . it's for him we're expiating . . . the brute! the torturer! . . . and they made him a saint . . . who baptized a round million Israelis by force . . . in the beloved south of our beloved France—that guy was worse than Adolf! . . . which shows you what you can learn on the top of a ladder . . . ah, Saint Louis! . . . canonized in 1297 . . . We'll come back to him!

As long as we're here as tourists, I might as well tell you something about the treasures, the tapestries, the woodwork, the plate, the armories—trophies, armor, banners . . . every floor was a museum . . . not to mention the bunkers under the Danube, the fortified tunnels . . . How many holes, hiding places, dungeons had those princes, dukes, and gangsters dug? . . . in the muck, in the sand, in the rock? fourteen centuries of Hohenzollerns! secretive diggers! . . . their whole history was under the Castle, the doubloons, the slain, hanged, strangled, and mummified rivals . . . the top, the visible part, all phony, trompe-l'oeil, turrets, belfries, bells . . . for the birds! a mirror for skylarks! . . . the real thing was underneath: the family fortune . . . the skeletons of the kidnapped, the caravans of the Danube gorges, the treasures of Florentine merchants, adventurers from Switzerland, Germany . . . that's where their adventures had landed them, in the dungeons under the Danube . . . fourteen centuries of dungeons . . . oh, they were far from useless . . . a hundred times! . . . a hundred air-raid alarms! they saved our lives . . . you should have seen the swarming and scurrying! the crowd under the Danube in those pluricentenary weasel holes . . . families, babies, papas, dogs . . . Kraut soldiers and guards of honor, ministers, admirals,
Landsturm
men, and the wrecks of the
Fidelis
and the P.P.F.° and the screwballs from all over . . . and Darnand's men, groping their way from catacomb to catacomb . . . looking for a tunnel that wouldn't cave in . . .

So familiar with the Castle? . . .you must think I was in good with the Court . . . oh, not at all . . . I wasn't a guest . . . don't get me wrong . . . I didn't have sixteen food cards . . . or eight . . . just one . . . That's what situates a man: 
the Card . . . I was admitted to the
Castle, yes . . .
but not
to eat . . . to keep tabs . . . how many cases
of flu?
how many pregnant women? new cases of scabies? . . . and how much morphine had I left? . . . how much camphorated oil . . . ether? . . . and the state of my infants . . . on that point Brinon had to listen to me . . . I went to town . . . the way they were dying on usl . . . six a week! . . . they were killing off our babies on purpose . . . absolutely . . . with raw carrot soup . . . I mean it . . . all children of collaborators . . . infanticide . . . absolutely intentional . . . the real hatred of the Germans, I might say in passing, was directed against the "collaborators" . . . not so much against the Jews, who were so powerful in London and New York . . . or against the Fifis, who were supposed to be "the Vrance of tomorrow" . . . pure and sure . . . but against the
"collabos,"
the dregs of the universe, who were there at their mercy, really weak and helpless, and their kids who were even weaker . . . let me tell you: the Nuremberg trials need doing over! . . . they did plenty of talking, but all lies, nothing to do with the case, beside the point . . . Tartuffes! . . .

This children's camp in Cissen was a morgue operated on raw carrot soup, a Grand Guignol nursery run by phony doctors, Tartar charlatans, sadistic maniacs . . .

Naturally Brinon knew all that, I wasn't telling him anything new . . . but there was nothing he could do about it.

"I'm sorry, doctor, I'm sorry."

Brinon, "animal of darkness, secretive, very taciturn and very dangerous . . ."

"Watch your step, doctor . . . Watch your step."

Bonnard warned me . . . Abel Bonnard° knew him well . . . I have to admit that with me, in our work together, Brinon was always correct, regular . . . and he' could perfecdy well have reported some of the wisecracks that were attributed to me . . . in public and in private . . . that Germany was through . . . Adolf on the skids . . . it would have been easy for Brinon to have me sent someplace . . . "animal of darkness" . . . or not . . . he didn't . . . the Parties were suspicious of me, too . . . Bucard, Sabiam,° etc. . . . the
M
ilice
°
. . . because I wasn't
a
member
of
anything . . .
that I
ought to be in a camp . . . faraway . . .

Public opinion is always right, especially when it's really idiotic . . .

Oh, of course I
had
reason to distrust Brinon, that "animal of darkness" . . .