Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die
Chapter 30
Halleluiah!
Bangs her knuckles once on the door of the women’s room. Doesn’t wait for response. Yanks open the door. Strides past the sleeper (Number 2). Halts before Numbers 1, 3 and 0 on their knees, stupidly trying to establish direct connection.
Claps her hard hands and delivers the information and the orders and withdraws.
Addresses herself to the sleeper now. Claps her hard hands inches from Number 2’s ear, to no avail. Reaches out to shake her awake and at the last instant snatches her hands (although safely rubber-clad) away. Anyhow, Number 2 is now staring up at her and she delivers the information and the orders.
Helen sees the iron face of the middle-echelon female functionary they call Sadie, sees her starved pale lips moving but hears no more than an indistinct whisper like ashes down a chute. Sadie has already left the women’s room, heading for the men’s room, when Helen remembers and removes the protective earplugs she’d fashioned out of the candle to protect a dream she’s unable to return to. She hears the kneeling trio crying “Halleluiah! Halleluiah!” She replaces the earplugs and turns to the wall.
Sadie bends over Number 4. Asleep too. She claps her hard hands inches from his ear. He jerks awake and she jerks her hands out of harm’s way and informs him that the Advocate is coming this very morning and will receive them collectively in the Common Room. He (Number 4) must dress immediately and be prepared to present his defense. She leaves.
Seymour hears “Halleluiah! Halleluiah!” from the other side of the partition. He tries to remember who ‘Advocate’ is. It finally comes back, after all that time. “Halleluiah!” he says.
With one exception, they’re pathetically grateful for at last being officially taken notice of. Stalled for decades, the rusty cobwebbed bureaucratic machinery has suddenly been set in motion. Their fate is being processed through the correct channels now. An end, at last, to those hopeless attempts to short-circuit the system, to emerge by their own devices, blundering down dark corridors all those years and still in the dark for all their pains.
So that auspicious morning they stand wide-eyed and joyous (four of them at least) in the windy corridor, backs against the wall, awaiting the coming of their potential liberator.
Seymour can’t help thinking of a parody of the Liberation of Paris. Instead of those cheering crowds lining sunny avenues, awaiting their liberators back in August 1944, five half-lifers in this dim windy corridor, in who knows what year. The historical comparison strengthens as Seymour hears distant slapping martial soles and a metallic clatter, constantly interrupted as though the tank had broken down and been repaired and had broken down again, all with astonishing rapidity and over and over.
But nearing, the tank turns out to be a crippled clattering wheelchair and the soldiers two familiar functionaries, petulant Philippe, pushing the wheelchair at a fast trot, followed by Hedgehog who is puffing badly.
A white-haired old man in a black gown is slouched in the wheelchair, rummaging in a sloppy pile of papers in his lap. His ample sleeves flutter in the wind. Every few seconds papers take off and Hedgehog scrambles in pursuit, crying, “Maître, Maître, your papers!” Philippe halts; the old man recovers his papers; the wheelchair jolts forward a few yards; more papers fly away; Hedgehog cries: “Maître, Maître, your papers!” And so it goes, till finally the wheelchair comes to a screeching halt before the Five.
Advocate – for who else can it be? – proves to be sound (if unsteady) of limb despite his advanced age and his handicapped mode of transportation. He slowly raises himself out of the wheelchair and lurches toward them with a benevolent smile. “Mes enfants!” he exclaims in a very rusty voice, communicating at the same time a powerful reek, like that of an exploding cognac distillery.
“Oh God, no!” says Seymour, turning to Helen. But she’s returned to her room.
Supported by the two lower-echelon functionaries, Advocate totters into the Common Room and stays there for hours, probably sleeping it off, Seymour bitterly comments to the others. And this lush is supposed to defend them.
Finally Sadie returns and announces that their advocate (whom they must address as “Maître”) is prepared to welcome them. They all go out into the corridor except for Helen who’s on her bed, back to statistics. That holds things up.
Sadie strides into the women’s room, halts at the bed and repeats that their advocate is prepared to welcome them, Number Two must get up immediately.
“If it’s me you mean, I’d rather not,” says Helen.
Sadie is scandalized at this passive resistance. You have no choice in the matter, she says. The presence of all of the Suspended Arrivals is indispensable.
“I’d rather not,” says Helen.
Number Two is jeopardizing the operation of administrative review for all concerned, says Sadie.
By this time the others are there and they beg Helen to join them and not jeopardize their chances for transfer.
“I don’t mean to be obstructive. If it makes you feel better I’ll come. But it’s a farce like everything else here, here and back there. Can’t you see that after all this time?”
Advocate stands at the head of the library table, gripping it to correct his sway. He’s a very old man with a mane of thin dingy white hair, a thin mouth and an aquiline nose. He looks like Franz Liszt in his final years, the same theatrical spirituality after youthful excesses. His dominant mask-like expression with them is paternal benevolence, which he maintains even during that first visit in his lamentable state. He wears the traditional French black lawyer’s gown with a white jabot. There’s a sprinkle of dandruff on his shoulders.
His wide sleeves flap with his eloquent rubber-gloved gesture of welcome as he invites them to sit down. Doing that, he resembles a giant bat vainly trying to take off. Unsupported, he comes close to falling on his face.
His rusty bumbling opening words are even more outrageous than his aspect.
“Hem-hem. Er … in my … er … official capacity as your … harrumph … advocate allow me to … to … hem … welcome, yes, welcome you to the Préfecture de Police. I am … harrumph … without exaggeration, both happy and … and … yes, truly happy and honored to … er … to be … defending New Arrivals.”
He beams feebly at them.
New Arrivals! In an outraged babble they let this sodden parody of an advocate know that they’d been suspended in this place for maybe a quarter of a century. Why has it taken him such an incredibly long time to contact them?
He looks at them with rheumy distressed eyes.
“Has it been – as you say – ‘long’? I have just been notified of your arrival.”
They explode again.
“Whaddideesay?” Max asks, completely out of it. Helen quickly translates. Max bellows:
“New Arrivals my ass! Jesus, we been here forty fucking years and this boozed-up shit-head of a lawyer just learns about it now!”
Smiling benignly, Advocate addresses the others and confesses to a “hem, culpable ignorance of the tongue of Shakespeare.” He requests a translation of his client’s words.
“He’s not happy about the delay,” says Seymour. “Basically none of us are.”
Advocate leans forward, fearfully glances about (and, strangely, up at the ceiling) and confides in a low, less hesitant, voice:
“Your … er … unhappiness at the state of affairs in the Préfecture is, alas, all too justified. Things here (and elsewhere, on a much higher level, I suspect, but shh!) are no longer what they once were. I dimly remember, oh, dimly, dimly, a distant, all too distant, past when the … er … channels of communication were free of encumbrance. Decisions were reached instantaneously. Orders were immediately carried out. Arrivals in Administrative Suspension were exceptional. The Préfecture itself was kept up. Ceilings were not permitted to crumble, nor staircases to collapse. You have doubtless had sufficient … er … ‘time’ to observe the sad state of disrepair of the Préfecture. An
d decay grows apace. Certain people maintain – I am but citing them – that a firmer hand on the tiller … But shh!”
“Whaddideesay?” Max asks Seymour.
“He says things are fucked up here. We need a lawyer to tell us that?”
Advocate’s voice, at the beginning rusty like a tool long unused (the Five even wonder if they aren’t his first audience in decades), gradually recovers professional eloquence as he examines the causes for the sad administrative decline.
He incriminates the system of promotion. Each promotion, he explains to his restless captive audience, brings with it not only an enlarged sphere of authority but also more bits of memory of a past existence, thousands of additional scrambled jigsaw puzzle pieces belonging to a set of a billion billion pieces of everything ever seen or felt in a previous lifetime.
“And that reward (some would say curse, but shh!) is the basis of the temptation, the terrible disruptive temptation.”
Stern-faced, Advocate lets go of the table and lifts his hands theatrically as though repelling temptation. He barely manages to maintain his balance.
“What, you wonder, is the nature of this temptation? For functionaries of weak character the temptation is to dwell inwardly, trying to fit the disparate fragments of memory into coherent scenes of past existence. You will ask: what scenes? Scenes of joy? I reply: scenes of joy, yes, but principally scenes of transgression (although it is true that joy and transgression are not mutually exclusive, far from it). What motivates, you wonder, the quest for memories of transgression?”
Advocate breaks off dramatically and stares at the Five who don’t ask or wonder anything at all. They sit slumped with glazed eyes in their chairs, perfectly indifferent to the problems of the Administration, waiting for Advocate to focus on their own problems. But Advocate continues on his single track.
“Transgression, of course, explains the presence of the functionaries here. Their quest for memory of that transgression is a quest for absolution. Absolution and with it the supreme reward of release from this joyless place into blessed void. But for absolution there must be contrition.”
Advocate clasps his hands and bows his head. He tries, unsuccessfully, to force his stiff features into a contrite expression. Then he looks up with a successful expression of despair and questions his clients rhetorically.
“How, though, can there be contrition for a forgotten act? Hence the temptation to piece the bits of memory together into the configuration of that sin, an operation we call familiarly, ‘walking the inner corridors’. But – my central point – this self-centered inward gaze inevitably results in gross neglect of administrative duties.”
Advocate pauses to clear his throat and blow his nose, like a trumpet.
“Whaddideesay?” Max asks.
“I wasn’t really listening,” says Helen apologetically.
“Nothing to do with us,” says Seymour, not knowing how wrong he is.
Advocate examines his handkerchief, thrusts it into a pocket and resumes.
“Inward vision blinds one to the external world. But without outward vision, without constant attention to humdrum detail, the struggle against attrition and entropy (which sap the base of all structures in the universe) is impossible. In theory, single-minded concentration on administrative duty on the functionaries’ part would ensure the defeat of dust, ensure that no file would ever be hopelessly misplaced, no corridor below be allowed to collapse, no gross errors involving the processing of Arrivals be allowed to occur. Such, alas, is not the case.”
Advocate makes a broad concessive gesture, again endangering his stability.
“I anticipate your question. Are there no sanctions, you wonder, for neglect of administrative duties? I reply: sanctions exist of course. This is a place of sanctions. Flagrant errors or omissions are sanctioned, severely sanctioned, by demotion and attendant loss of memory-bits, an excruciatingly painful suppression like the tearing away of flesh. But … but …”
Advocate breaks off, shoots fearful gazes to the left, to the right and above. He leans forward over the table and whispers: “It is clear that the number of memory bits possessed and with it the number of combinatory possibilities – and so the temptation of the inner gaze! – is directly proportional to the functionary’s rank. But, assert some – how true this is I cannot or dare not say – here, as in all organizational structures, impunity is directly proportional to power. And at the higher decision-making levels (some dare to claim at the very highest level) omissions and errors, unsanctioned, have dire consequences. How, I ask you, can these high-placed functionaries possibly make judicious administrative decisions if they persist in walking the inner corridors, their vision focused on cryptic images like … like …”
Advocate stiffens. His eyeballs roll upward giving him the blank-eyed aspect of a statue. He whispers hoarsely: “… like … like … an evening cloud shaped like a knife, a grief-stricken female face, a high gray wall surrounding uniformed inmates, a lightning-blasted oak, a charging bull, a window open on a rose garden and the naked diseased woman’s inviting voice behind, what woman, what woman? and vultures circling down on what dead prey? and, oh, the children, great-eyed with fear herded into the cattle cars, was I powerless witness or heartless participant?”
Advocate stands there like a blind seer, arms outstretched. He goes on and on in a monotonous drone for long minutes, undistracted by the audible restlessness of his audience, the creaking chairs and murmured protests.
Finally he breaks off the senseless jumbled catalogue. Outward sight returns to his blank eyes. He stares in bewilderment at the Five and the Common Room as if seeing them for the first time.
He mutters a dismissive: “Yes, yes, I wish to thank you for your kind attention.”
Seymour and Louis and Margaret protest violently at this dismissal after nothing, nothing at all.
Advocate blinks heavily, peers at the Five one by one, then down at the papers on the table.
“Of course, of course, to be sure, the New Arrivals. Allow me to welcome you to the Préfecture de Police. I am both happy and honored …”
“You already welcomed us to the Préfecture de Police an hour ago,” says Seymour. “And we’re not New Arrivals, we’re Old Arrivals.”
“And, my God, getting older and older all the time,” says Margaret.
“God? Time?” Advocate mutters.
Recognition and memory return. Advocate’s focus is wholly outward now. He snaps into brisk efficiency and informs his clients that prior to a private interview with each of them in order to draw up elements of their defense, he is at their entire disposal to reply, to the best of his ability, to queries of collective interest, assuming they have such queries.
Oh they have, they have. The same questions are often phrased differently by the Five. Advocate sits down and notes them, in reduced form, in a spidery hand.
What are our chances of being transferred and when will the decision be reached? (M. Williams, L. Forster, S. Stein, M. Pilsudski, translated by H. Ricchi.)
This is Hell, isn’t it? (S. Stein).
What did I do to deserve Hell? (S. Stein, M. Williams.)
If transferred will we be middle-aged or, worse, old and perhaps even senile? (M. Williams, L. Forster, S. Stein.)
If transferred will we meet certain loved ones we once knew out there? (M. Williams, L. Forster, S. Stein, M. Pilsudski, translated by H. Ricchi.)
Why do you all wear rubber gloves in our presence? (S. Stein.)
Why are there no novels here? (H. Ricchi.)
Advocate places his pen on the table. Pursing his lips, he stares down at the sheet.
“Allow me, if you will, to dispose of the more minor of your questions. Regarding books: a library with a sizable selection of volumes in French and English was once at the disposal of the Administratively Suspended. The collection has been inexplicably dispersed, no one knows where. Just as there was once a cinema, a well-equipped gymnasium, decent hot meals served
with wine. Why these amenities are no longer available is not clear.”
Advocate now addresses Question Four, no minor question: their age in the event of transfer.
Margaret interrupts him tearfully. “Who wants to go out there old?”
“Ah, on any terms, my dear, many people would.” Advocate brushes dandruff from his shoulder. “Even if eighty, to be able to sit in sunshine eating plums and watching breakers and gulls for only a fraction of a heartbeat. Or even ninety and deaf, toothless and blind and vacuous, to be able to smell plums and feel the hot sun. One learns painfully to moderate one’s expectations. But such moderation, it is true, does not concern you. Your demands have no reason to be moderate.”
Advocate now explains in elaborate metaphoric terms what they already know and don’t need explaining: that upon arrival in the Préfecture their stopped clock had been rewound and the hands set back to an advantageous early time. He holds up a warning forefinger and informs the Five that they age here as they had aged out there.
They don’t need to be told that either. But what follows they hadn’t known, had never dared to imagine.
“But when you are transferred to the outside world (as I sincerely trust you will, all my efforts are bent to that end), the biological clock – if I may be allowed to pursue the metaphor – will be set back to the age conferred upon you when you arrived here, in accordance with your sojourn date.”
It’s the first bit of good news in decades for four of the Five. Their joy isn’t dampened by Advocate’s information that once they are transferred to the world outside the aging process will go on, ceaselessly. The rewound clock will tick on and on as before, each tick marking loss of vital stored-up energy. The hands will chase each other again. One day the spring will go limp, the ticking will stop and the hands halt, for good this time.
That doesn’t bother them. They aren’t out for immortality. Seymour is surprised at Advocate’s clock metaphor in this place without clocks or sense of time.
“As to Question Two, (will you, in the event of transfer, meet certain beloved individuals known in the former existence), I am happily in a position to state unequivocally: yes, absolutely yes, this meeting is guaranteed, programmed even.”
Oh they feel so much better, nearly all of them.
Advocate continues. “Question Four: is this place Hell?”
His shaggy white eyebrows knit with the intensity of his reflection.
“Hell: the locus of Divine Punishment for sins committed in the previous existence. That punishment is part of the Divine Scheme, how could I, of all people, possibly deny that blatant fact? But the dull gray Préfecture scarcely corresponds, I think, to the classic image of Inferno. Where is the colorful animation, where is the warmth generated by eternal flames of lovely red? Or if the flames of burning brimstone, lovely blue? Where are the notorious female sinners, their unclad bodies in attractive postures of torment?”
Advocate shakes his head sadly and begins assembling his papers. “I believe I have touched upon all of your questions.”
No, no, the principal one, they protest in chorus, remains unanswered: what are their chances of being transferred and when will the decision be reached?
Advocate ponders theatrically and finally pronounces: “The decision-making process is, as you see, underway. A favorable ruling is by no means absolutely excluded. That is, for those Arrivals for whom administrative records exist proving prior residence in Paris.”
Max intercepts the dubious glance Advocate shoots his way.
“Whaddideesay?” Max asks Helen. “He said something about me, didn’t he?”
“No, nothing at all about you, Max. He says there’s a good chance we’ll all be transferred.”
A very kind and very poor translation, Seymour thinks.
Advocate beams feebly. “Having answered all your queries, to your satisfaction, I trust, I shall shortly proceed to a private interview with …” He shuffles through the pile, clicking his tongue with impatience, and finally chooses a sheet. He peers at it and resumes. “Yes, a private interview with, hem, Madame Ricchi and … er … Mademoiselle Williams and … and … ah … Messrs. Stein and Forster.”
Seymour wonders what invention Helen will come up with to explain why Advocate hasn’t bothered placing Max on the list of Suspended Arrivals to be defended.
He’s on the point of reminding Advocate that he hadn’t answered his question about the rubber gloves when the door opens and Sadie, who must have been listening at it, orders the Five to return to their sleeping quarters and await their turn to be interviewed.