The Avignon Quintet (105 page)

Constance was frankly puzzled by the obvious disarray of the General who seemed hardly to dare look at her directly – except once when the Prince announced that she might become the Red Cross nominee and he stared fixedly at her for a brief second before timidly replacing his monocle.

“In my case,” said the Prince airily, “I am from a neutral country and have several propositions to put before the responsible people here – if I can find who they are. For example …” he drew a deep breath before embarking upon a subject to which he could not foresee very clearly the German reaction. “The Jews!” There, the word was out! “With whom do I discuss the Jews? I have proposals of the most far-reaching kind from the Jews of Egypt to present to someone. Who is it?”

They looked at each other, the five German officers, with an awkward complicity disguised in a stylised hauteur; it was as if the introduction of such a subject had been a gross breach of good manners. Von Esslin stared at the far horizon and cocked his ear in the direction of Fischer who, after a moment of thought during which one could look into his features as if into a well and see right back into his childhood, smiled and moistened his lips. Constance was amazed for none of them looked really hangdog, really guilty. They all believed in what they were doing! The most troubled was the General, and he had the air of ruminating over matters far removed from the present exchange. “You must see Vichy,” said Fischer, “Laval – the bureau for Jewish affairs. Remark, it won’t do any good. It won’t stop this – he calls it
prophylaxis!”
He gave a smile, a snake-like grimace in which the eyes did not join as he resettled the cutlery beside his plate. Mahl chuckled lazily and added, “Now the French Milice has arrived with its new uniform all will be well.” This released a spring and everyone felt disposed to smile in agreement. “What new uniform?” asked the Prince curiously, and was given a description of it by the contemptuous Fischer. Khaki trousers, blue shirt and beret. “No doubt they will wish us to salute them in the street!” he said, his voice full of merriment, and his audience of uniformed men guffawed in polite fashion. “Very well, I shall call upon Laval,” said the Prince, “since you have no powers, since you are simply the instruments of the old Marshal.” They did not quite like this; as a diversion Constance who smelt the hostility in them said, by way of a palliative,
“Aber
, my own problem is one you can solve, General, I am sure. I own a house just outside the village of Tubain. If I accept this Red Cross post will I be allowed to live in it while I work in Avignon? I used to spend the whole summer there once, and it would be easy to open it up. Would you permit me?”

All at once everyone felt relieved, for here was something they could comply with easily enough. They felt suffused with archaic gallantry. “I see no reason why not,” said the General amiably. “Indeed we have the very man with us – hey there, Landsdorf!” The deaf officer cupped his ear and had the situation explained to him by Professor Smirgel who had not ceased to cast hungry and admiring eyes upon Constance ever since he had heard her patrician accent. Landsdorf looked surprised for a moment and then nodded quite vigorously to indicate that the eventuality was well within their scope. Constance’s heart rose with pleasure. “It will however be very cold, and perhaps not really safe,” said the General as an afterthought. “But I am sure you can arrange things to suit you; perhaps to share it? And the Red Cross will have transport, no?”

They surmised as much and Mahl became very knowledgeable on the subject of black market petrol as compared to the rationed variety. They were still canvassing the subject when the signal was given for them to retire into the comfortable cretonne-covered armchairs which adorned the dining-room. Smirgel managed to sneak himself into a seat beside Constance with an eagerness which at first she took for sexual attraction – it caused her misgivings that she was admired by this goat-like creature. But it became rapidly clear that he had other interests in mind. “Did you also know Lord Galen?” he said at the first opportunity, and when she replied in the affirmative went on, “Did you know what he was doing?” It was rather a thorny point and she hesitated for a moment before saying, “Very vaguely. He was a businessman. Perhaps the Prince here would tell you more.” But the Prince was disposed to be modest. “I was his sleeping partner; he was trying to find the Templar treasure – we found almost everything but that … Greek and Roman statuary, medieval ware, ancient weapons …”

They looked at him with respectful attention. “But treasure there was
none!”
he said emphatically.
“None!”
There was a long silence. Everyone had half-inclined towards Smirgel, as if he perhaps was the oracle who alone had the right to pronounce upon the subject – as indeed he had, for his sole task was to do just that. He looked quizzical now, as he lit a cigarette; then, watching Constance closely as if for a reaction, he said, “That is not what we hear from the chief clerk Quatrefages, who is our prisoner and whom I have interrogated myself. I must add that the question is an important one for us as the Führer has a particular interest in the matter. I am here on his special instructions to try and solve the mystery.”

The Prince looked rather peeved at this, for his suspicious mind toyed with the idea that perhaps after all Galen had unearthed the treasure but kept the secret to himself; perhaps he knew, Quatrefages knew, the whereabouts of the orchard with its fabled quincunx of trees? But no, it could not be! Lord Galen was too much of a fool to be able to manage a double-cross like that without giving the show away. He shook his head in a decisive manner and said, “No, it is impossible! At any rate,
we
did not get it. Nor did we ascertain whether it really existed. Quatrefages had been dismissed already when … you gentlemen crossed the border into France.”

Smirgel was lying, in order to find out how much they knew – that was how the Prince summed matters up. It was obvious that the Nazis knew nothing either. But they had the task of convincing Hitler of the fact, and that could not be easy. He sighed. He would take up the matter again with Lord Galen when he was next in Egypt; could something be done for the poor clerk? “Where are you keeping the boy?” he asked, but no answer was forthcoming and the Prince let the matter slide, busying himself with preparations for a visit to Vichy with its notorious bureau for Jewish affairs. Meanwhile Constance agreed to show Landsdorf where the house was – he would call for her on the morrow and motor her out to Tubain, simply to familiarise himself with the spot and decide whether such a scheme was feasible so far from the town and the protection of the armed forces. This sounded somewhat disingenuous. “I am not likely to be shot by the
French
, after all!” she said, and Landsdorf turned a trifle red. “Nevertheless!” he said, and they shook hands on the deal.

The duty car duly motored them back into Avignon later in the night; they were stopped on the bridge by an armed patrol whose task was to enforce the curfew which had been declared for eleven o’clock, but their shepherding adjutant made himself known and assumed responsibility for them. The hotel was in darkness, but as they tapped upon the front door the manager rose from the depths of an armchair where he had been dozing against their return. He had prepared a tray of something hot, and also hot water bottles for them to take to bed. They were glad to turn in, both being preoccupied and tired by the journey – a fatigue and depression that lingered on in irritating fashion. It was reinforced by a vague impression of unreality as if everything were swathed in cotton wool. The depression and sadness of the whole community seemed to be leaking out into the atmosphere, infecting it; even with the brief glimpse they had had of the town they had the impression everywhere of faces crashed down into depression. They had smelt the stench of war now; it was more than the smell of folly, of disaster. It was the smell of intellectual disgrace, of human deceit. Constance sat on the side of her bed, warming her hands round her coffee cup, and thought back over the evening she had just spent. A lighted candle puckered the darkness about her. She found herself recalling the conversations, she went over them meticulously, as if to come upon some clue as to what made these soldiers perform their acts. Suddenly the thought came to her:
“They are not ashamed of what they are doing!”
And of a sudden a chill of pure terror entered her heart.

She got into bed and turned out the light, blew it softly out, to settle back in the cold sheets which smelt of damp. In her restless sleep she dreamed of the blue gaze of Fischer, its fixity and its mineral-like quality as of some worn-out gem. It was a gaze full of unconscious sexual information. He could deprave, this man, simply by smiling. In him she felt some buried puzzle which had never been deciphered yet. And yet there was magnetism, compared to the others who were easily understood, easily classified. The General was a harmless fool as apt for good as for evil – provided it came in command orders. He had looked quite confused by her beauty, he would be easy to handle if need be …

The subject of this somewhat unflattering judgement had, for his part, also retired to bed – or, more accurately, retired in search of sleep which was to prove extremely elusive on that particular evening, coloured as it had been by the strange new visitor – in the guise of an apparition, almost. Constanza! He bathed in the memory of her blondness, of her warm blue regard, and the sentiment permeated his sensibility with tenderness made the more rich because its object was someone long since dead. But there were confusing cross-currents, rapids and shallows, which perturbed him, prevented him from sinking into his usual heavy slumber. There had been the letter from Katzen-Mutter, for example, which had stung him to the quick with remorse. It was a brief sad letter about the family house but which, halfway through, recounted the suicide of the Polish maid; she had stabbed herself through the heart with the old dress dirk belonging to some forgotten regimental outfit, and which had always been on the wall in his room, over the writing desk. On the desk itself she had left a message in clumsy German which read: “I do not wish to be a slave.” His mother did not expressly reproach him, nor in any way suggest that she might have known what the relationship between them had been … yet! It was as if she had known, and he felt a profound shame for something of which he could not be accused of being guilty.

It came, too, hard upon a field episode which his rank obliged him to witness – the “judicial execution” of twenty citizens in a small village near which a
franc-tireur
had fired upon his panzers, killing two troopers. It made him feel old, indeed mad with fatigue, but he behaved with a dutiful sternness, walking up and down the line of dead with determined step. There was hardly any blood. They had fallen in all kinds of positions. They looked, with their shabby black winter clothes, like a clutch of dusty fowls lying beside the tiny war memorial. He returned to his office in the fortress with a splitting headache, feeling the two separate emotions of the two distinct events blend inside him and trouble his composure. He wondered if he was perhaps getting influenza. But that night and the next he dreamed of the Polish maid, and on waking he realised that he must find some way of attending confession. He must find a priest. And here once more the cursed ambiguity of his position as a Catholic came upon him like a huge weight. Why not the Cathedral? Indeed why not – but he could not, as force commander, move without escort for fear that someone might take a pot shot at him. Kidnap a priest, then? He laughed gruffly. Simply join a congregation for mass, then? He spoke very bad French!

The situation worked upon him. He became a prey to constipation and colitis – childhood illnesses which no longer responded to senna or castor oil. And now, miraculously, after meeting Constance all was well. He knew he would have the courage to insist on being shriven somehow – he would go to the Grey Penitents’ chapel, he would go out to Montfavet with Smirgel; what did an escort matter? Nobody would notice, after all. He felt elated, as if this strange meeting had been an omen of a favourable sort. Constance! He had nothing to read and he felt the need of a calm half hour before sleep claimed him. He turned with renewed perplexity and respect to the little official booklet – the intellectual absolution offered by Dr. Goebbels. It was hard going, the Protocols of Zion, and he was not too sure about the historic role of gold in the matter; he felt an exaggeration somewhere but, after all, the document was an official one: who was he to question facts endorsed by Rosenberg? Rosenberg, himself a Jew – so he had learned! It was even more perplexing. Yet he was in a sudden mood of relaxation, almost of euphoria. Proof: his blocked entrails performed their duty now with rapture, with profusion, as if to make up for days of costiveness. Overwhelmed by the feeling of relief he slept, having made a mental note to visit the chapel of the Penitents on the morrow.

But to Constance sleep did not come so easily, troubled as she was by the memories of the dinner and the empty stare of admiration from the blue eyes of Fischer. It made her impatient, she tried to analyse the dynamism of the glance and came at last to the conclusion that it was his capacity for cruelty and mischief which gave him an almost sexual radiance. She was angry with herself for feeling such a thing and reflected ruefully that at any moment the woman keeps in mind, like undeveloped negatives, several sexual possibilities, several choices which circumstances might put in her way. She turned with impatience to a more troubling topic-Affad; when she had called at the hotel the Prince had asked her to see him, for Affad was indisposed and in need of a prescription from a doctor. “The simplest is to ask you,” he said, “though he is dead against it, doesn’t want you troubled.” She took the lift up to the elegant suite which Affad occupied and found him lying quiet, staring at the ceiling; he blushed with vexation when he saw that it was Constance, and expressed his displeasure with the Prince. “Nonsense,” she said briskly, “it’s much quicker for me to make out the prescription.” “Very well,” he said unhappily, “I have run out of Paludonin, that is all.” She sat down by the bed and said, “I shall get you some.” But she took his wrist in order to feel his racing pulse, and at once remembered her conversation about medicine in the bar with the two friends Sutcliffe and Toby. Perhaps he did too, for he turned scarlet and turned his face away to the wall, with a womanish gesture of shyness. She was, so to speak, left alone there with his pulse and her science – and bereft of words. It was as if he had slipped off a glove. But what came into her mind was a thought which confused her in her turn. She did not quite believe it, but she felt certain that he had fallen deeply in love with her, and the thought was both chastening and elevating. It forced her really to consider him, to evaluate him as a possible person she might love in her turn. A woman is a creature who keeps all her options open. “You have a blazing fever,” she said, because saying something filled an awkward space, and he nodded at the wall, keeping his eyes closed. “If you could just give me the prescription,” he said, and it was clear from his tone that he was anxious to see the back of her. But she had not brought her printed prescription block, so she elected to slip down to the pharmacy at the corner in order to fulfil his request. “I will send the bottle up with the
chasseur”
she said. “It should pull down the temperature dramatically – but you know that.” He nodded once more, and lay as if asleep. “Thank you,” he said. “By tomorrow I shall be up once more.”