Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (19 page)

He lay back exhausted, aware of the steady strengthening of the acute wind. It tasted, for some reason, of fermentation—marc, stale beer, something. Then he raised his head in terror. He had been brought to the edge of some sea. Northern and chill, it seemed a sea he was sure he knew, but not (O Christ O God help us) from this shore. A quay with bollards, high-masted men-of-war riding at anchor.

Hee the seen witheen

Deeth eenc

That was a high fife piping somewhere. He saw the flag and screamed. Jeering boys, ship’s monkeys, clambered barefoot yarely my hearties up the sacks and freed him from his knotty ropes with baccy-stained jackknives. Stiff as he was from the bonds and the terror, he was yet able to surprise them all by agitating his limbs in the manner of a monkey-up-a-stick he had once had as a boy in Ajaccio. Pushed toward the cobbles, he caught with his nails at a sack and grieved to see how ill-kept the fine hands had been allowed to become and nearly wept at the breaking of the nail of the right mercurial finger. The sack tore open, so that a mess of damp rubbishy newspapers, all French, was disclosed as stuffing. He read in a split instant:
LA
LUTTE
É
TAIT
TERMIN
ÉE.
IL
AVAIT
REMPORT
É
LA
VICTOIRE
SUR
LUI-M
ÊME.
IL
AIMAIT
… He was now upright, in a boxing stance, on the slimy quayside, already shouting
I
am
come
to
set
you
free
. None understood the language he was speaking, and he himself was surprised that he knew it. It was some kind of ancient Mediterranean language, older than Latin. He mimed liberty (a man cheering and dancing); he mimed liberation (the tearing-off of chains and manacles) but the crowd seemed appalled. A gentleman who sneezed on a snufftake and looked like Talleyrand cried:
Un
sorcier.
Donnez-le
au
feu
. He was ready to agree with twenty nods, saying
Yes
yes
the
fire
I
know
fire
I
can
control
fire
have
I
not
always
had
the
better
of
fire
, but brawny tars’ arms, blue-tattooed
MOTHER
and
ENGLAND
HOME
AND
BEAUTY,
grasped him, raised him, and with a heave ho me hearties thrust him to the dirty eager water that lapped the stones of the quay. As he hit in wretched panic and anger, teeth ready to bite it, the quaking roof of the Channel a single shout rang. He surfaced gasping from the filthy world of slobber and green ropes of slime. There was a rowboat there now with an ancient boatswain and callow midshipmen, and he thankfully grasped towards the oarlocks. But oars hit out at him, and he saw, callow grins beyond, his own blood stain, though in salt dilution, a sogged newspaper floating.
ET
À
PROPOS
PENDANT
QUE
NOUS
EN
SOMMES
À
CE
SUJET
VOICI
UNE
CHANDELLE
POUR
ALLER
VOUS
COUCHER
VOICI
UN
COUPERET
POUR
COUPER
VOTRE
TÊTE
. The massed guards bands from the quayside played and hallelujah choruses sang:

There he lies

Ensanguinated tyrant

O bloody bloody tyrant

See

How the sin within

Doth incarnadine

His skin

From the shin to the chin

He awoke in Moscow to resignation of a sort and also resentment. His heart was not pounding, as it should from nightmare, but kept calm time to the beat of the funeral march that had been in the dream, purged now however of its gross words. It was indeed a theme of great dignity played by the bands of his army but remote, pulsing out from some city many versts away over these frozen plains. But were they frozen? No, not yet. He was anticipating: there was still perhaps time. He stopped the sound in mid-measure. Resignation to the truth that he had not conquered that woman-element. That was all the dream meant. The sea was not his nor ever would be now. The sea was theirs. Water was treacherous and, in a certain mad sense, unnatural. It could not be shaped. It would, though grudgingly, be bridged. It would consent to play in fountains. It would consent, though coyly through a metal membrane, to agree to consent to agree to be coaxed to respond to the coaxing of fire. It could be seen as an aspect of land or as a servant of the body. But river, spring, bath had only the remotest kinship with the measureless pits of tigers with the salt teeth. What was the Empire? Children, what is the Empire? It is what sea can surround, sir. Sea defined it.

The resentment was a resentment that his own elements of earth and fire should now be, though temporarily, turning against him. Temporarily only though: mark that. Terrain refused to be battlefields and fire ramped through the Moscow streets. Fire, however, could always be doused. Tomorrow surely land would thud with battle or else yield on a map to new apportionments and containments. His fingers (clean, well-kept, nails untorn) itched to be at work with protractors as a pianist’s (who was that pianist girl who had once giggled at him?) for a keyboard. He put his hands behind his head and lay thinking grimly in his nightshirt: a raft of fingers to hold him from sinking into the deep pillows after a dream of sinking. The bedroom was huge and still tropically hot from the fire that, itself now sinking, had begun as a roar of tree-trunks, leaves and all. The Kremlin fireplaces were grossly ornate, proscenium arches framing a
drame
of fire. There was no better play in the world than the performance of fire in a great fireplace. But not sinking, no. He got out of bed and trod many meters of white bear-rug and Italian marble. He manhandled a couple of pinelogs long as himself and thrust them on, panting. An apocalypse of sparks, a roar. In time he stopped himself from kicking the logs into a deeper engagement with the flames. He was barefoot.

Turning his back to the fire he felt that heat altogether friendly, protective as an army. But then, as he squinted at the picture over his bed, viewing it as it were from a cannoneer’s angle, a far and obscure vision of an obscure Muscovite princess, there came the stab. The sudden mockery of a stab of fire behind the breastbone. Heartburn, a nervous bolting of ill-cooked venison, raw and burnt. Strange: raw and burnt were aspects of each other; the cooked was something altogether different. He clapped his spread left hand to the pain and noted, looking down at the gems of the rings which, having flared in firelight, now slept in the great shadow he threw, that this was the gesture he had first used when the image of what that failed assassin had willed burnt into his consciousness. The stab that had not been, and yet the very intent was an abiding pain which the dyspeptic pang now, as it were, clownishly seemed to wish to mime. That the liberated should wish to destroy the liberator: was not that altogether against reason? He heard a silly song somewhere on the Teutonic horizon; a damson sunset rung with it:

Wach’ auf! Es nahet gen den Tag!

lch hör’ singen im grünen Hag

Ein’ wonnigliche Nachtigall… .

Or some such yearning nonsense. He had been told the words and had them explained to him; he had known no German at all then, knew little enough now. A ridiculous language, rather like English though more raspingly and sorrowfully naïve, unfitted for hypocrisy.

At Schönbrunn during a review of the troops, after the Wagram victory, a student with hair on fire with the October sun. A petition, Sire. And then the fire of the dagger in the sun, and then Rapp’s hand staying the dagger. The student’s name had been Stapps. Stapps and Rapp. Destroyer and savior drawn into a foolish intimacy of rhyme. Rapp Stapps Rapp Stapps—the rhythm in his brain, so crass a rhythm, had become the thud on a funereal drum, muffled and snareless. General Rapp, a fine ADC but with a brain that could not think round corners. “To think that he’s the son of a Lutheran minister. A Lutheran minister from Saxony. I cannot believe it.” He had written to the Burgomaster of Schönbrunn to say: “He confessed all to His Majesty the Emperor. Tomorrow is fixed for his execution. To think that he is the son of a Lutheran minister from Saxony. I cannot believe it.”

O Deutschland arise

Light is rising in the

Deutschlander skies.

More nonsense. Student songs. They ought to get on with their fucking studies.

“You are the son,” N said, “of a Lutheran minister from Saxony.” They were alone together in a small sitting room of the palace. He had insisted on this. He had to find out
why
. “You were brought up on good Christian doctrine. Thou shalt not kill, and so forth.”

“Some things have to be killed. You know that. You, Bonaparte, have done enough killing.” He spoke good slow French, straight out of books. Everything he said at first sounded too bookish to be offensive, like dialogue from some novel in French he had read earnestly to improve his French.

“You call me by my surname. That is, I suppose, refreshing. No nonsense about Sire or Your Majesty. You object to royalty, is that it? I too object to royalty. In a way. There is royalty and royalty, of course. You are a republican? I am a republican too. We have at least that in common.” And he had let the great warmth, guaranteed to melt anything, beam out. The boy, stupid German fool, was not melted.

“I object to foreign rulers. Let Germany be ruled by her own princes. It is the presumption of foreign rulers I scorn and execrate.”

“Ah. It is not just me?”

Stapps let the tip of his long nose twitch into a sneer. “You are a godsend to the patriotic assassin. With you out of the way at least one dynasty comes to an end. I have thought at times of killing the Austrian emperor. But his race goes on. He has heirs.”

He would not sit. He would take no refreshment. He stood in the middle of the carpet, like a good erect little German toy soldier. But he was no soldier. N put him into uniform and then pulled him out. He wouldn’t last a ten-kilometer march. Then N caught a swift vision of Josephine, smiling away at a whole adoring salon with her teeth hidden, elegant bitch, not doing her job, nothing kicking around in her belly. N restlessly stalked about thin upright scornful Stapps. He said, heeling the flowery carpet, his hands behind:

“I am presented to you as some sort of tyrant, yes? That will be the English with their lies. Not the English people, but the rulers of the English. What they are impotent to do by force they seek to do by the poison of misrepresentation. Be honest with me now.” He addressed the thin straight back. The left sleeve of the dirty green jacket had been half-torn from the shoulder in the violence of the arrest. “What agent persuaded you? How many English pounds were you paid or promised?”

“None to both questions. It was for Germany. I failed. I am sorry I failed.” The sorrow sounded so sincerely personal that N was absentmindedly fain to say
Not at all
. The boy said: “Now let me pay. Let us get it over with.”

“I can see the attraction of martyrdom, yes yes. To cry
Down with Tyranny
as the guns are raised. It is a schoolboy dream that I have dreamed myself.” He came round quickly to look up into Stapps’s water-blue eyes. He felt himself small and tubby in this straight pared presence. A boy thinned down to a patriotic gas jet. “What I wish is to let you go. Let you leave this room and this palace and go free.”

“So,” another boy’s sneer, “I can tell everyone of the magnanimity of the French emperor.”

“Nothing wrong with magnanimity. Magnanimity is nothing to be ashamed of. I should be glad of your saying that. No, not for that reason. And don’t think I’m scared of your martyrdom. Ah no, since there seems to be no cause here for which a man could worthily die. To be a martyr for the cause of belief in a flat earth or the right to eat cow-shit.”

“Eat what? I do not know the expression. I have not before already met it.” A bit confused now.

“Never mind. Can’t you see that it is I who am the cause, I and what I stand for? I stand against old tyrannies, I stand for equality and decency and justice and mercy and forbearance. I stand for humanity. I don’t want you to die. And why not? Because I want you to see the light. I want you to grow into the light. Can’t you see that, German idiot that you are?” He had become too loud, he was growing irritable, there were many papers to sign and people to see, he wished to God this German idiot would be willing to sit down. “Why the hell,” he yelled, “won’t you sit down?”

“You are uneasy in yourself, Bonaparte,” Stapps said kindly. “You are all nerves and irascibility. You are also a foreign tyrant. Down,” he said conversationally, “with tyranny. Long live a free and united Germany.”

“Such utter utter.” N took in sourly a large canvas of some old Austrian victory on the wall, naked goddesses swimming down through the sky to fondle a monarch stern but with cat’s eyes. “What’s Germany to do with it? There’s no such thing as Germany anyway. What’s Austria or France or Corsica or any of the other false and foolish abstractions to do with it? I’m not France conquering Austria or these German states you’re on fire about. I’m the spirit of the French Revolution, the American Revolution, any damned revolution you please. Nation is a false doctrine, you German idiot. It’s a sin to want to die for a nation. What I want is a united Europe, not a bundle of yapping and farting little nations. There has to be a head of this united Europe. Well, perfectly simple, I happen to be the head. Not through blood but by election. By merit. I’m fit to be the head. Who else in Europe would you have, God blast you? One of these sweet-lipped little princes of yours, hunting by day and fucking by night, potbellied little tyrants—” Infelicitous, he saw that too late. “Real tyrants, though petty ones, grinding the faces of the—”