Nazis in the Metro (12 page)

Tegret cheered along with the crowd.

—Do you think you killed one or many Bosnians?

—Over there, they’re called Turks! I certainly hope I didn’t waste any bullets …

Francis passed in front of Gabriel, who forced a smile. On stage, the interview continued.

—What does it feel like as a painter to trade a paintbrush for a Kalashnikov?

—One hour of war, and you’re forever cured of painting, of the illusion that it’s possible to represent the world, to interpret it! What a waste of time! You have to smash it! Assault it, take it back! The reality of shooting at your sworn enemies gives you a sensation of strength, of freedom … It’s an immense joy. I’ve fought in Moldavia, in Slovenia, in Bosnia, in Abkhazia, in Krajina, and everywhere I’ve felt the same intense pleasure … I have never felt as free as when I’m surrounded by the burning houses of Muslims, the stench of
Turkish corpses, the odor of cowards’ piss! Art can’t hold its own against that …

A religious silence accompanied these words, which he delivered with impassive eyes behind his corrective lenses.

—In your opinion, will these wars remain limited to the old grounds of the former Soviet empire?

Astrapov took a breath.

—If you want to know my real opinion, I would like for the Russian nationalists to get over the liberal illusion of their alcoholic czar and his prime minister, Pileofshitski, who has destroyed our race, our people! It’s time to go on the offensive. If we act now, things could be settled quickly, with a minimum of damage. If we wait, we’re looking at deaths by the thousands.

Tegret sensed that the audience had become very attentive, receptive.

—The liberal illusion is another name for democracy … Does that word make you afraid? Does it disgust you?

Astrapov stood up and leaned toward the room, shouting now:

—What about you, what do YOU think about democracy?!

A wall of boos rose to meet him. He sat back down, his face red.

—I could give a fuck about the Parisian democracies of Fabius, Lang, Stirn, and Stasi like I give a fuck about the New York democracies of Rockefeller and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer! May they peacefully rot and die in their respective holes. I am simply asking the question: How long will we tolerate wars waged exclusively on the poor?

The audience stood in a single motion and chanted Astrapov’s name. Only Commander Jovan Gavrovic, with whom no one could communicate, was left with his ass glued to his chair. Gabriel took advantage of the warriors’ communion to slip away. The freight elevator was more efficient and quieter going down. It deposited him in front of the skinhead on duty, who quickly concealed his pistol, while checking tenderly to make certain it was loaded.

Gabriel had neither the strength nor the lack of judgment to go home. Better to go for a spin first. He took the Peugeot out to the interior ring road and drove, keeping the speedometer at a constant 140 KPH. The radar sensors flashed twice on his circular flight. Of the exits spelled out on the blue overpass signs, none was the one he needed. He spun like a squirrel in a cage, blinded by his own motion.

The Mess
.

The messengers of hate are back.

On his sickbed of Saltpeter and Pity, Sloga had droned, “Max, the square, loudspeakers,” his head cracked open by the fists of fascists on whom he’d trained the lethal screen of his Mac. Gabriel accelerated again. Who was Max? On which square were the loudspeakers spitting? Porte d’Aubervilliers, Porte de la Villette, Porte de Pantin, Porte de Bagnolet … The left-wing “red” suburbs gave way to the right-wing “brown” ones—where the French fabricate Frenchness for little French people! Which square? The proud speakers of Marx Square? On his second pass, he crossed over streets crowded with commuters descending on the Porte des Lilas. Maybe Gégé, “the philosopher,” would have the beginnings of an answer …

Gilbert Gache, a philosophy professor who, due to a lack of imagination on the part of his contemporaries, had been saddled with the nickname Gégé, lived at the top end of Rue de Belleville, below a bakery that shared a wall with a Pakistani spice factory that serviced the Chinese restaurateurs at the bottom of the same street.

The scent of decaying fish, requisite base for the alchemy of
nuoc mam
, impregnated everything, even the voices of the divas trapped in the opera CDs that Gégé listened to while endlessly rereading the classics of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis. The perspective one subject provided to the other and vice versa plunged him into abysses of despair. The world would never be able to recover … So he never dove into the chasms of critical reasoning or the socialization of the libido without his provisions of Morgon, Chassagne-Montrachet, or de Pommard. What was most remarkable was that this combination of Freudian Marxism and suicidal alcoholism seemed to work well for him, and even at such a late hour, his discourse remained as clear as it was astute. He welcomed Gabriel as if they’d just seen each other the night before, when in fact it had been nearly three years since their last encounter.

Gégé had been runner-up for the championship title in French weightlifting while he was acing his high school literature exams, and he had maintained his truck-driver’s build, which was a sensation in the classroom and helped recruit several student athletes to the side of Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer. He immediately filled two mustard jars with a ruby-colored Gevrey-Chambertin and cut off the whistling of a German diva with a tap to the stereo remote.
Gabriel duly complimented the quality of the wine before telling the hulky philosopher about Sloga’s misfortunes, the book of quotations, Pedro’s insights, his visit to the Gaston Lémoine offices, and finally, the events of earlier that evening, with the skinhead pressman, the kamikaze painter, and the ex-professional revolutionary turned fascist. Gégé listened to him without interrupting, leaning back in his chair, his eyes half-closed, his nose in the divine perfume of his Burgundy. When Gabriel had finished, with an account of Astrapov’s impassioned call for a third World War, Gégé set down his glass and uttered this simple sentence:

—What surprises me is that this surprises you.

—Hold on! I’m not some naïf. With Le Pen and De Villiers attracting more than twenty percent in the presidential elections, we know that the trend toward authoritarianism isn’t just about a few overzealous extremists … I’ve become complacent, relying on old assumptions: that the right will become more and more extreme … a sort of organic evolution. What I’ve discovered from Sloga’s work is this massive ideological shift of certain people on the left, and not only the poor people in the projects, the ones who fall through the cracks … These are politicos, writers, journalists, profs …

Gilbert Gache refilled the jars of wine.

—We could talk for days about this: the loss of meaning, of social utility, the vanishing of points of reference … A simple experiment is enough to reveal the gravity of this crisis … I’d like to ask you to summarize for me, in just a few broad strokes, the platforms of the current strands of mainstream French thought … Gaullist, liberal, communist,
socialist … Go ahead … Try to describe their platforms for me …

Gabriel mumbled some vague concepts about equality, the new Europe, the strong franc, the protection of social benefits, competitiveness …

—Now, try to do the same thing with the platform of the National Front …

—France for the French, preferential treatment for citizens, the expulsion of immigrants, salaries for mothers paid for by the state, rejection of Maastricht, reestablishment of the death penalty, transfer of the ashes of Pét …

Gégé had to stop him.

—You see? The results are irrefutable. On one side, a blurriness, a lack of ideological distinction, a long-term view … On the other, crude notions hammered home, the demagogic but terribly effective precision of sloganeering, and miracle fixes … We all have an irrepressible need to act on the world, to transform it. To think that our own weight can be enough to bend the common destiny. It’s easy to transform this human quest into simple terms of war and winning, to name adversaries, even to invent them for the occasion … Their greatest strength is that they promise instant change, they offer distraction from despair. You can’t understand the fascist illusion if you lose sight of the fact that it’s also a doctrine, a mystique. And one that works equally well on lost souls in the projects and on tenured professors!

Gabriel knew that Gégé was right. Still, he tried to play devil’s advocate.

—The horror of the Nazi camps, the resistance, none of it was that long ago! There are limits to our moral …

—Everything would be simpler if memory were a measurable, quantifiable thing … For those who were deported, fifty years is like a day, maybe an hour … For the little bastards you’ve just seen in action, it’s an eternity, which is like saying it never happened. The other night I was watching a documentary about the eighth of May, 1945, in Sétif, when the French army deliberately massacred at least fifteen thousand Algerian rebels. An old Kabyle man was telling the story of how he’d come back from the European front, where he’d fought against the Nazis, to learn that his entire family had been executed. The journalist said to him: “After a half-century, the wound must have healed, though, hasn’t it?” The peasant looked at him. After a moment, he responded: “In 1935, when I was ten years old, my schoolmaster, a Breton, taught us the history of France. He explained in detail the atrocities committed by the Prussians—he called them Krauts—during the war of 1870. It was more impressive to me than the tales about ogres and spirits that our elders told at bedtime … This schoolmaster wasn’t old, he was born with the century, and still he hadn’t forgotten what he himself had not experienced: a war that took place thirty years before he came into the world! How do you expect me to forgive the murderers of my father, my mother, and my two brothers?”

Gilbert Gache granted himself a Burgundian respite. Gabriel took up the charge.

—Exactly! How can you justify the fact that the
communist papers are receptive to the writings of these fascistic morons? If anyone has fallen prey to the cult of repressed memories, it’s them.

Gégé paused to fully appreciate a swallow of Chambertin, then set down his glass.

—First of all, I’m not justifying anything, especially in this domain. I’m trying to understand. Some people point out that it was easy for the National Front to take the Communist slogan “Made in France!” and add “by French workers!” as a way of appropriating it for their ends. That’s not untrue. We can always find someone more nationalistic than we are. The real explanation is to be found elsewhere, in my opinion.

—Where, if I might ask?

—In ’89!

—First you convince me that the Big Bang happened fifty years ago, and now you’re going back to the French Revolution? Make up your mind!

—The year ’89, if you’ve been paying attention, occurs once in each century … So I will be more precise: 1989. The year of many dangers, when Gorbachev tried to forestall the implosion of his empire by letting go of Poland, of Czechoslovakia and East Germany, with the incandescent symbol of the Berlin Wall as it fell … For years, no one but the most naïve and fanatical still believed in the existence of the “socialist system,” in the “worker’s homeland” … The Revolution became like Lenin’s mummy rotting away in its mausoleum-sarcophagus, with armies of scholars still attempting to dust it off. As if we needed the body of Nietzsche to make use of his ideas—what impoverished
thinking! There is really no one more religious than materialists!

—And ’89? Haven’t we strayed?

—If you require a readymade discourse, go back to your skinheads and their commandant Gregovic … Dialogue is thought in action …

—Gavrovic, not Gregovic …

—I stand corrected: Gavrovic … The higher-ups of the French Communist Party were worried that the ground-swell wouldn’t spare them, that the party would disintegrate … The majority tried to save what they could. Some moved quickly and rejoined the socialists, some became “re”-something or other … Re-founders, re-constructors, renovators … Others caught in the shipwreck latched onto any plank that floated within reach. The more rotten, the better. Among them there was, of course, Kevin Kervan’s
Continental Furor …
The outlet for a generation of earnest imitators of Céline, Drieu la Rochelle, Brasillach … Writers who live by proxy. It existed for this small faction, and the result was a commingling of communist and fascist bylines. An adjunct secretary general of the C.G.T. rubbed shoulders with the editor in chief of the far-right journal
Présent
, the director of a communist publishing house sat down with anti-Semitic pamphleteer Mac Daube, the members of the central committee of the Communist Party signed editorials that appeared below racist cartoons by the caricaturist from the
National Weekly
! And in a single month, Ivan Astrapov gave his chronicles on Yugoslavia to both the fascist monthly
Shock
and the communist weekly
Revolution
. One of the editorial writers for
Humanity
, Pierre Jumel, who
is said to have foresight, was repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism, was even condemned by the court more than once, I believe … It wasn’t until the communist “intellectuals” invited the founding philosopher of the New Right, also the director of a fascistic review, to a colloquium on “the renaissance of critical thinking” at the Institute of Marxist Research that a scandal finally erupted in their ranks.

Gilbert Gache stood up to open the window. The smell of decomposing fish wafted into the room. Gabriel pulled the fabric of his shirt to his nose.

—China awakens! Do you believe that any of them would be idiotic enough to bust the head of a forgotten writer looking into the subject six years after all this happened?

—It’s unlikely. As long as the relative majority of the Communist Party has moved into a relatively clean house … Maurice Céninf, its Number Two, was put in forced retirement; the official poet, Frederic Romanescu, now works as a private editor under the name Merle the Mockingbird; and
Revolution
, the communist paper that gathered up the largest portion of the drifters, has simply been scuttled.