Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (20 page)

“Claptrap. You know it’s claptrap.
Bobards, verbiage, phrases
vides,
” just to make all clear. “Your trouble, Bonaparte, is that you live in the past.”

“Me? I? Live in the—I live in the—Oh God, oh sacred mother of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ, oh fucking buggery. I live in the—” He had to sit down. He chose a gilt bowlegged masterpiece of discomfort and gaped up at the clean proud young raised stupid chin. Stapps, he could see, could see himself in the blue cherub-encrusted mirror over the tiny fire, green wood slow to blaze; he was being posterity looking at Stapps giving bold talk to the French emperor. “I live in the past, eh?” N said, smiling. “Good good, the past. Now then, friend, all I want you to do is this. Give me a written statement, an apology, something of that sort. Say you were drunk or ill, temporarily deranged with fever, doing it for a student wager and you didn’t mean it. Or, ah a good one, you were testing our security. Something like that, that’s all. And then you’re a free boy.”

“You don’t understand.” The tone was of a good weary patient provincial German schoolmaster. “I meant it and mean it and will go on meaning it in whatever piece of time I have left to me. I meant it and I mean it and I’m far from alone in meaning it. This is the nineteenth century, not the eighteenth. I don’t mean the
old
past, though you’re trying to teach French schoolchildren that not much happened in history between Charlemagne and you. Things are changing. Science.”

“Knowledge? Learning? When you consider what we, I—
Are we not on the side of
—?”

“Your dreams are unsupported by the
right
knowledge. Communications between one wing and another of an army. Great centers of manufacture. Research. The English are good at these things.”

“The English the English the.” He was on his feet again, prepared to batter Stapps as if he were the English. Stapps nearly supported the fancy, saying:

“You forget that the English are a kind of German people.”

N danced briefly in terrible rage behind Stapps’s back, making noises. Stapps watched some of the dance indifferently in the mirror. He then said: “Change and science. The
Volk
.”

N came round to Stapps’s front, one eye closed, the other fierce enough for the two. “The what? What was that word?”

“The
Volk
. Untranslatable. The German people is becoming aware of its destiny.”

“Oh my God.”

“You don’t understand. You’re not German. You don’t know our language and literature and folklore. You don’t weep with joy at the smell of the German forest or the German sunrise over the German mountains.”

“Oh my God. Oh my God.”

Stapps went ecstatically into his own tongue for a space:

“
Habt Acht. Uns dräuen übel Streich’:

Zerfallt erst deutsches Volk und Reich,

In falscher wälscher Majestät

Kein Fürst bald mehr sein Volk versteht….”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” N moaned, “shut up. Shut up,” much louder, “that fucking gibberish, do you hear?”

“
Baragouin
?” The boy knew the word or guessed at its meaning. Very coldly he said: “You see what I am trying to say when I say you do not understand the
Volk
. We are the only pure race in Europe and must remain so. Our tongue is the old pure Aryan. France is a mongrel country full of Jews. We must keep ourselves clean. Once our blood is mixed with the lower races we become cursed of God, Jesus Christ turns his back on us.”

“He was a Jew, man, what the hell do you think you are saying?”

“In him was the
echt
blood of the Aryans.”

“You’re mad,” N said. “Really mad. Certifiable. I
can’t
allow you to die mad. I shall send you to an institution somewhere.”

“We don’t want a united Europe,” Stapps said, reasonable now. “We want a united Germany. You, Bonaparte, would fix us all in an immutable pattern made in Paris. Classical stagnation. Peace and calm.
Pax Gallica
. But the imposition of peace and calm are inimical to the evolution of the German, that is to say human, race. Stein said that.”

“He did, did he? I know all about Stein, damned imitation Prussian. What sort of a name do you think
Stein
is, anyway?”

“Aryan.”

“Yes yes, naturally, of course.” Sarcastic. And yet Stein had freed the serfs and started a university in Berlin and reformed the Prussian Army. N had an intimation, announced as a gnawing desire for luncheon, that what he was doing for Europe was teaching it the most efficient techniques for rising against him. But could anyone really take seriously this nationalism business? What was that word again?
Folque
or something. Young men blinded by the light of what they called reason, actually a perversion of the true French commodity. Illuminism. He said:

“You are a student and hence willing to learn. Learn from me now what our modern history is all about. It is not about the struggle between nations. It is about the struggle within society itself. It began in ‘89 with the rising of the oppressed against the oppressor. That was in France, but there was no talk then about recovering some great golden age of a special French minting and everybody being made free to weep with joy in the glorious French forests and all that fucking nonsense. There was no talk of nation. It was a matter of making slaves free—not just French slaves but slaves everywhere. Because all over Europe the oppression was the same—gorging kings and princes and fat-bellied priests and the power and the glory theirs forever and ever amen. You talk about the destiny of this German
fouque
or whatever it is. Well, the destiny of the French was the destiny of a group of people who’d seen the light first, not a fucking resurgent nation. And this destiny was to set up and preserve the first model republic of free and equal men and at the same time to teach its principles to those who had not yet seen the light. We weren’t fighting the Austrians and the Germans, man, we were fighting the armies of the oppressors of the Austrian and German people. Can’t you get that into your thick German skull? And that glorious piece of modern history is still proceeding, friend. Europe has to be free of the dirty past.”

“Some parts of Europe,” Stapps said, resuming sneering, “seem to like the dirty past. Spain, for instance. England, for example.”

“If I could land my armies in England tomorrow the oppressed English would feed us beef and beer and give us their women.”

“And the oppressed Spanish?”

“They will see the light, given time. It’s the damned English getting in the way.”

Stapps did a surprising thing. He moved one pace to the left. Then he said: “Oh, fool fool fool. People don’t want to be made to be given what the French think is good for them, they want to find out things for themselves in their own way. To the Spanish, Spain is a bigger thing than equality and liberty and down with the fat-bellied bishops. Don’t you see, fool, Germany wants to be Germany first? The rest can follow later, if Germany wants it.”

“I will not be called a fool,” N said. “Calling me a fool is taking rebelliousness too far. You will retract that ‘fool.’ ”

“I will retract nothing. I will say what I wish. I am going to die anyway.”

“You are not going to die.”

“Oh yes I am.”

“Oh no you are not.”

“Oh yes I am.”

“Oh no you are damned well not,” he said, moderately. “I am the one round here who says who will die and who will not die. Within reason, that is,” still moderately. “You are not going to die.”

“Oh yes I am.”

“I tell you, puppy dog,” N said, getting up and standing in front of the fire, “you are going to sign a document of retraction and apology and then walk out of here a free boy.” But he was troubled. He took a pellet of licorice from his comfit-box to quieten his yapping stomach. “It may be a problem of language,” he said. “French is not really your language. French is the language of reason.”

“In any language I will speak to you good reason.”

“There, you see. That did not sound quite like French. We’ll have it all drawn up in German. Then you sign and off you go. Roustam!” he bawled, “Roustam, black bastard!” Roustam at once opened the door as though he had been eavesdropping. “My compliments to General Rapp and tell him to come here at once.” Roustam went off. To Stapps N said: “This is the officer who stayed your assassin’s hand. He speaks German.”

“The truth is the truth and is above language.”

“Ah, that’s all German nonsense. Pure reason and all that sort of chopped-up dogmerd. Ach.” He kicked the sluggish green logs viciously. “What you’re saying is that I’ve gone wrong. I won’t believe it, it’s not common sense. It’s not up to a mere boy to tell me I’ve gone wrong.”

“There must always be somebody. However young or insignificant. There has to be somebody who comes from nowhere to say what others are too foolish or frightened to say.
Ich kann
nichts anders
.”

“If you want to speak German wait for General Rapp.”

“This is German that even a Corsican should know. That is what Luther said. I cannot do differently from what I now do.”

“Ah, Luther, eh? You want to be Luther. If you only realized the trouble that that fucking man has caused.” He spoke confidentially, as though Luther were out there, rampaging with a bible and farting against the rational truths of Latin Christianity. “Luther, indeed.” And then, “Aaaaah.” For Roustam was opening the door and General Rapp was entering hatless, with a bow and a heel-click. “Look here, Rapp,” N said, “this boy wishes to die and be a martyr for what he calls Germany. What do we do with him?”

“Better him a martyr, Sire, than, with respect, you yourself.”

“He says I’ve gone wrong, Rapp. Get him to speak to you in his own horrible language.”

“Sire.” At once Stapps entered a big murky German forest, full of yelps and cooings and sawyer’s rasps. Rapp listened sadly and at length said: “He says that if you let him go he’ll try and kill you again, in the name of the German soul or some such thing. He will not accept—with respect, mine, not his—pardon from a blood-soaked Caligula. He says that he knows that some other brave patriot who believes in the destiny of the German race will be successful in sticking the knife, with respect, into your guts bloated with the bloody flesh of the innocent, even if he failed. It is only, with respect, a matter of time.”

“Yes yes yes, I know all about that, yes.” N stamped once round the room as if roughly yarding it out for new carpets, mumbling. Then he took in a chestful of the smoky air by the fireplace and spent nearly thirty seconds letting it go, an imperial pint or sigh, making the smoke bluely waver. Stapps responded to this, as though it were a new tyrannical statement, by entering a sharp thicket of clauses and compounds and cadences of regretful-seeming assertion. Rapp paraphrased, saying:

“It is, with respect, the mark of a fool, he says, not to look into the future and see what it holds. With respect, Sire, you, he says, are not looking to the future. It is the Germanic races, such as the Germans and the English, that have the brains to build the future. While you, we, are leading big cumbersome armies all over Europe and talking of honor and glory, the English are developing steam engines and spinning machines. That is all he wishes to say except, respect again, down with tyranny and long live a free and united Germany and now he is tired of all this and wishes to be taken out and shot.”

N grasped Stapps by the thin arms. “I am your father,” he cried. “I am everybody’s father.”

“That,” Stapps neatly said, “is because you are nobody’s father, except illegitimately.”

“The father does not kill the son,” ignoring that remark, “however much the son wishes to kill the father.”

“My father is a Lutheran minister of Saxony. He is a German and a patriot.”

“Well, give me a month to learn German and then I’ll be a German patriot too. And a Lutheran, if that’s what you want. It’s not difficult to be anything once you’ve been a Muslim. Well, a sort of Muslim and the Egyptians more or less accepted us as such. But first first first, mark this, first I’ll be a European.”

“You will never understand. Stop embracing me. You are like a Russian bear. It is the hateful embrace you are giving to all Germany.”

“With respect, Sire,” Rapp said, “you are stronger than you think.”

N let go. “I feel responsible for you,” he mumbled, “like a father.”

Stapps, as in a parody of military drill, raised his right forearm and made the gesture of snuffing out a candle. He grinned sourly. “Show some respect, damn you,” Rapp cried in French. N now stamped and screamed, frothing:

“Go on, then, you squareheaded idiot with your fucking stupid lingo of coughs and rasps and sausage-words, go on and be a fucking martyr for a nonexistent cause. But I tell you this this,” hissing straight into his face, “this this, you cretin, that nobody will know about it, that a forged letter of regret and apology will be sent out, General Rapp will work on it at once won’t you Rapp, also a forged medical certificate affirming your insanity, signed by the chief doctors of the Great Army, I’ll forge their damned signatures myself, here and now, and that history will record the magnanimity that General Rapp himself has witnessed and has been thwarted by your damned stupid German obstinacy. Have him marched out,” he told Rapp. “Have him shot. Get him out of everybody’s way.”

“Down with tyranny,” Stapps said, as though quietly quoting a Lutheran text. “Long live a free and united Germany.” And, as an afterthought, “Your breath is bad. It’s a bad breath that is blowing over Europe.”

Had, N wondered now in the Kremlin bedchamber, there been a funeral procession, or had he merely dreamt it? As one got older, the memory of a dream became hard to distinguish from a memory of fact. He put his two right middle fingers on his nose and cupped the rest of his hand round his open mouth, blowing and at the same time snuffing. Yes, breath bad. What did it profit a man if he gained the whole world and yet had bad breath? On the wall as wide as a stage a cortège moved, dead Stapps drawn by two Saxon drayhorses, a Lutheran minister reading some nonsense from the Lutheran bible, full of
geschlossen
and
unaufgeknöpft
, or some such obscene Nordic gibberish, students singing rawly
Ein
Feste
Burg
, a tune which N had to admit he rather liked. What in fact had happened to the body? He went baaaaah loudly at the vision and it vanished. As he had sounded aloud he now spoke aloud, barefoot-flapping from one end of the fireplace to the other: “We had to have the Continental System, didn’t we? Even if it ruined the Russian timber trade, didn’t we?” And then, ceasing pacing, up at the wedding-cake icing of the ceiling: “I had to get a divorce, didn’t I?”