Promise at Dawn

  “For three days,” I replied.

  He appeared to be much impressed. He looked at us both with marked respect. Then he said:

  “Eh bien, you sure have it in you.”

  My mother returned from her holiday bubbling over with projects and energy. Business in Nice was beginning to look up again, and now it was in the company of a genuine Russian Grand Duke that she made the round of hotels with her “family jewels.” He was new to the job and very embarrassed by the part he had to play, and she wasted a good deal of time in lecturing him severely on his lack of moral courage. There were, at that time, something like ten thousand Russian families living in Nice, a noble assortment of generals, Cossacks, Ukrainian atamans, colonels of the Imperial Guard, princes, Baltic barons and has-beens of every sort and description, who succeeded in creating on the shores of the Mediterranean a dark Dostoievskian atmosphere, minus the genius. During the war they split into two camps, one of which worked for the Germans and supplied a number of recruits to the Gestapo, while the other played an active part in the Resistance. The former were liquidated at the Liberation, the others became wholly assimilated and vanished forever into the fraternal melting pot of Renaults and Citroëns, of holidays with pay, café-crême with croissants, of disgruntlement and abstention at election time, so that their children do not even speak Russian today, which I find sad.

  My mother treated the Grand Duke and his little white goatee with ironic condescension. All the same, she was secretly flattered by the association, and never failed to address him, in Russian, as “Your Serene Highness” even when she made him carry the bag. The Serene Highness, in the presence of possible purchasers, became so terribly embarrassed, so unhappy, and maintained so guilty a silence while my mother was describing the precise degree of his relationship with the late Tsar, the exact number of palaces which he had owned in Russia and the close ties he had with the English Royal Family that the tourists all felt that they were “in on a good thing,” that they were exploiting a poor defenseless creature, and so almost invariably clinched the deal. From my mother’s point of view he was a valuable asset, and each day, before they set out on their rounds, she gave him twenty drops of his medicine in a glass of water, for he suffered from heart trouble. The two of them could often be seen together on the terrace of the Café de la Buffa, busy making plans for the future, my mother confiding to him her plans to make me a French Ambassador, His Serene Highness describing the kind of life he hoped to lead after the collapse of the Communist regime and the return of the Romanoffs to the throne of Holy Russia.

  “I mean to live quietly on my estates, far from the court and public life,” announced the Grand Duke.

  “My son,” said my mother, sipping her tea, “is destined for diplomacy.”

  This realistic pair could talk thus endlessly, as long as the tea lasted.

  I do not know what became of His Serene Highness. There is a Russian Grand Duke buried in the cemetery of Roquebrune village, not far from my own property, but whether it is the same one I do not know. Anyway, without his white goatee I doubt if I would recognize him.

  It was just about then that my mother brought off her most successful deal, the sale of a seven-story building on what used to be the Boulevard Carlonne and is now the Boulevard Grosso. She had been hard at work for several months, running through the city like a busy ant, trying to find a buyer; she knew that if the sale materialized it would ensure my first year at the University of Aix-en-Provence. It was quite by accident that the eventual buyer turned up. One day, a Rolls-Royce stopped before our house. A chauffeur opened the door and out stepped a short, roly-poly gentleman, followed by a young woman, twice his height and half his age. She was a former patroness of my mother’s fashion house in Vilna, and among the kindlier souls of that foul lot, and the plump little gentleman was her recently acquired husband, who was a “millionaire,” the first I had ever met of that fabulous race. It immediately became apparent to us that they had dropped straight from Heaven. Not only did little M. Jedwabnikas buy the building, but, struck like so many others before him by my mother’s energy and spirit of enterprise, he decided on the spot to turn it into a hotel and restaurant, of which my mother should be manageress. And so it was that the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts—“Mer” as in mer (sea) and “monts” as in montagnes with a freshly painted façade and under “a new management,” opened its doors to “the international elite, in an atmosphere of tranquillity, comfort and good taste.” I quote the first prospectus word for word, for I was its author. My mother knew nothing of the very special art of hôellerie, but she immediately rose to the occasion and became a true professional in a matter of weeks. I have, since those days, spent a great part of my life in hotels the world over, and, in the light of the experience I have gained, I can say that with very limited material resources she achieved a miracle. Thirty-six bedrooms, two floors of “suites” and a restaurant, run with the help of only two housemaids, one waiter, a chef and a dishwasher—it was quite a task for a beginner. The enterprise got off to a flying start. My own contribution consisted in acting as receptionist, guide on conducted tours, maitre d’hôtel, and generally making a good impression on the clientele. I was by that time sixteen, but never before had I been exposed to human contacts in quite such massive doses. Our “public” came from every country under the sun, with the English predominating. As a rule they arrived in parties, sent by the travel agencies, and thus diluted by the democracy of numbers they showed a humble gratitude for the least mark of personal attention. Those were the early days of mass tourism, which became the rule shortly before the war, and has greatly developed since, and with few exceptions our “guests” were gentle, submissive, unsure of themselves and easily satisfied. Most of them were women.

  My mother got up at six every morning, smoked three or four cigarettes, drank a cup of tea, took her cane and went to the Buffa Market, of which she was the undisputed queen. This market, which was very much smaller than that of the Old Town, where the big hotels got their provisions, mainly served the pensions in the neighborhood of the Boulevard Gambetta. It was and still is today a place of varied accents, smells and colors, where superb curses rose into the air above the quarters of veal, the cutlets, the hams, where truly Latin, dramatic gestures flashed under the eyes of dead fish, where, by some benign Mediterranean miracle, the sweet fragrance of mimosa managed always to rise triumphantly over a thousand far less appealing smells. My mother would handle a slice of veal, ponder over the heart of a melon, reject with scorn a piece of beef—the flabby sound of which, when it was dropped on the marble slab, seemed to express shame and humility at being thus rejected—point her stick accusingly at some rusty leaf in a stall of salads, which its proprietor at once covered with his body, as if they were his insulted children, at the same time shouting in despair “don’t you go pawing the stuff, now!,” sniff at a piece of Brie, stick her nose into a Camembert—she had, when applying her nose to a cheese, a filet or a fish, a way of looking doubtful which made the faces of the stall holders turn white with exasperation—and, having at last rejected once and for all the wretched merchandise, she would turn away with her head held high, while a medley of challenging cries, insults, invective and indignant abuse sounded in our ears the oldest choir of the Mediterranean. One felt transported in a flash to some Eastern court of law, where my mother, all of a sudden, pardoned salads, joints and peas their doubtful quality and exorbitant price, thus promoting them in a flash from the rank of shoddy merchandise to that of “cuisine française de premier ordre,” in the words of the above-mentioned prospectus. For several months she would stop in front of M. Renucci’s stall, spend a long time handling his display of hams without ever buying any of them, in a spirit of deliberate provocation, inspired by some obscure quarrel, some personal account to be settled with him, all for the sole purpose of reminding him how important a customer he had lost. When the butcher caught sight of my mother sailing inexorably, cane in hand, toward his stand, hi
s voice rose like the warning note of a siren, and he would rush forward, lean his fat belly on the counter, wave his fist and assume the appearance of a man about to fight to the death in defense of his merchandise, screaming at his daily tormentor to go away. Then, while my mother brought her nose close to a piece of ham, with a grimace, first of incredulity, then of horror, and made it clear in expressive mimicry that an abominable stench had insulted her organ of smell, Renucci, with upcast eyes and hands clasped in prayer, would implore the Madonna to restrain him from committing murder, while my mother, pushing away the ham with a scornful and triumphant smile, would sail away to continue her reign elsewhere, in some kingdom of cheese or fruit, pursued by a storm of laughter, shaking fists, cries of “Santa Madonna!” and tragic oaths.

  Whenever I go back to Nice, I pay a visit to the Buffa Market, and I spend long hours among the leeks, the asparagus, the melons, the cuts of beef, the fruit, the flowers and the fish. The noises, the voices, the gestures, the smells and scents have not changed. It needs only very little, almost nothing, for the illusion to be complete, and this I achieve by closing my eyes. Then I wander through the market for hours on end, and the carrots, the chicory and the endives do what they can for me.

  My mother always returned home with a load of fruit and flowers. She had a profound belief in the beneficial effect of fruit upon the human organism, and saw to it that I consumed at least a kilo a day; ever since then I have suffered from chronic colitis. Then, she would go down to the kitchens, draw up the menu, see the tradespeople, supervise the petit déjeuner, which was always served in the bedrooms, listen to anything the visitors might have to say, see to the packing of picnic baskets for those who were going on excursions, inspect the cellar, do her accounts and attend to every detail of the business.

  One day, after going up and down the accursed stairs which led from the restaurant to the kitchens, which she climbed at least twenty times a day, she suddenly collapsed into a chair. Her face and lips were gray; she leaned her head a little to one side and pressed her hand to her breast. Then she began to tremble all over. We were lucky enough to get a doctor quickly, and his diagnosis was rapid and sure. She had given herself too strong an injection of insulin, and was suffering an attack of hypoglycemia.

  It was thus that I learned what she had been concealing from me for years: she was a diabetic and each morning gave herself an injection of insulin before starting on the day’s work.

  I was in a state of abject terror. The memory of her gray face, of her head leaning slightly sideways, of her hand clutching painfully at her breast, never again left me. The idea that she might die before I had done all that she expected of me, that she might leave this world without ever having known justice, that projection in the heavens of a human system of weights and measures, seemed to me to be a denial of the most elementary common sense, of good manners and law, and to show a sort of gangsterlike attitude on the part of fate that justified one in calling the police, invoking the moral code and the intervention of some supreme legal authority.

  I felt that I must hurry, that I had to write at top speed an immortal masterpiece which, by making me the youngest Tolstoy of all time, would enable me to lay at my mother’s feet my laurels as a champion of the world, the reward for all her pains and labors, and thus give meaning not only to her life of love and sacrifice, but to life generally, showing some hidden logic and cleanliness in it.

  With her full approval, I ceased going to the lycée for a while, and once again, shut in my bedroom, I rushed to her aid. I piled in front of me three thousand sheets of white paper—which, according to my calculations, was the equivalent of War and Peace. My mother gave me a dressing gown of ample proportions, modeled on the one which had already made a great literary reputation for Balzac. Five times a day she opened the door, set a plate of food on the table and tiptoed out again. I was, just then, using Francis Mermonts as a pen name. Since, however, my works were regularly returned to me by the publishers, we decided that it was a bad choice, and substituted for it, on my next effort, that of Lucien Brulard. But this seemed to give the publishers no more satisfaction than its predecessor. I remember how, a little later, when I was busy starving in Paris, one of the godlike beings who, at that time, was wielding a more than usually cutting whip in the editorial offices of the Nouvelle Revue Française, told me, handing back a manuscript which I had submitted: “Take a mistress, and come back in ten years. . . .” When I did go back, ten years later, in 1945, he was unfortunately no longer there; he had been shot already, as a collaborationist.

  The world had contracted to the size of the sheet of paper against which I flung myself with all the exacerbated lyricism of adolescence. And, in spite of the artlessness of those romantic outpourings, it was then that I realized the importance of the stakes for which I was playing and literary creation became for me a matter of survival, a necessity like air and bread, the only escape from the helplessness and infirmity of being human, a manner of yielding up the soul so as to remain alive.

  For the first time, when I saw that gray face, those closed eyes, that leaning head, that groping hand, I began to wonder if life was an honorable endeavor or if one perhaps ought to reject it as a matter of dignity. My answer was immediate, probably dictated to me by my instinct for self-preservation, and I wrote, at feverish speed, a story entitled “The Truth about the Prometheus Affair,” which remains for me to this day the truth about the Prometheus affair.

  For, no doubt about it, we have been cheated. The real adventure of Prometheus, or rather, the end of it, has been kept from us. It is perfectly true that, because he stole fire from the gods, Prometheus was chained to a rock and that a vulture began to devour his liver. But what we were never told is that when the gods, some time later, took a look at the earth to see what was going on there, they saw, not only that Prometheus had freed himself from his chains, but that he had seized the vulture and was devouring its liver so as to recover his strength and try to grab the sacred fire again. He was an artist.

  All the same, I still suffer from my liver. You will, I think, admit that there is good reason for that. I am at my ten thousandth vulture and my digestion is not what it used to be.

  But I am doing my best. And when a final stab of the beak chases me from my rock, I will be grateful if the astrologers watch for the appearance of a new sign in the Zodiac—the sign of a human cur clinging with all its teeth to the liver of some celestial vulture.

  The Avenue Dante, which led straight from the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts to the Buffa Market, had its starting point directly under my window. From my work table I could see my mother on her way back to the hotel when she was still quite far off. One morning, an irresistible longing came over me to talk about these matters with her and to hear what she thought. She had come into my room for no particular reason, as she often did, for the sole purpose apparently of smoking a cigarette in silence, with me for company. I was in the process of studying, with my graduation in view, some bit of flimsy nonsense about the structure of the universe.

  “Mother,” I said, “listen to me.”

  She listened.

  “It will be three years before I get my degree, then there will be two years of military service. . . .”

  “You will be an officer,” she broke in immediately.

  “But, for Christmas’ sake! that’s not the point. . . . I’m afraid of not getting there . . . in time.”

  This gave her something to think about. Then, with a loud sniff, and with both hands on her knees, she said: “There is such a thing as justice.”

  And off she went to see that everything was all right in the restaurant.

  My mother believed in a more logical, sovereign and coherent structure of the universe than anything my physics book could teach me.

  She was wearing a gray dress that day, with a violet tucker, a string of pearls and a gray coat thrown over her shoulders. She had put on a little weight. The doctor had told me there was no reason why she sho
uld not live for years. I hid my face in my hands.

  If only she could see me in the uniform of a French officer even if I never became an ambassador and never got the Nobel Prize for literature—one of her fondest dreams would be realized. I was to begin reading law next autumn at the University of Aix-en-Province, and with any luck . . . In three years I might make a triumphal entry into the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts, in the uniform of a second lieutenant in the Air Force. We had long ago, my mother and I, chosen the Air Force. Lindbergh’s Atlantic flight had deeply impressed her, and once again I kicked myself for not having thought of it first. I would go with her to the Buffa Market, dressed in blue and gold with wings stuck all over me and be exhibited to the admiring gaze of the carrots and leeks, of Pantaleoni, Renucci, Buppi, Cesari and Fassoli, with my mother on my arm, under a triumphal arch of sausages and onions.

  My mother’s simple adoration of France still continued to astonish me. When some exasperated tradesman called her a “dirty foreigner” she would smile, wave her stick as though to call the whole Buffa Market to witness, and declare: “My son is an officer of the French Air Force and he tells you merde!”

  She drew no distinction between “is” and “will be.” The gold stripe of a second lieutenant suddenly assumed enormous importance in my eyes, and all my dreams of laurels became temporarily reduced to a most humble one, that of strolling round the Buffa Market with my mother on my arm in the uniform of a second lieutenant. It was not really asking too much.

  CHAPTER 22

  Mr. Zaremba was a man in his early fifties: a tall, gaunt, gentle and somewhat withdrawn man. He appeared one day on the doorstep of the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts in white tropical clothes, with a panama hat and several expensive looking suitcases covered with labels bearing the exotic names of faraway places; he asked for a room for a few days and stayed a year.

  Nothing in his distinguished appearance, in his detached and beautiful manners, revealed that the elegant, much-traveled man of the world was really a little-boy-lost whom the passing years had buried deeper and deeper in their sands; and even later, when my knowing and cynical eye—I was almost eighteen and, naturally enough, considered myself in the full throes of maturity—began to notice certain interesting and promising signs in our guest’s behavior, I was still far from suspecting that men can become old and die or reach high positions while never outgrowing the child within them who sits in the dark in his short pants, longing for attention. With a little less juvenile perspicacity and cynicism, and a little more true understanding, Mr. Zaremba would perhaps have served me as a premonition of things to come: good manners excepted, there is a strong likeness between what he was then and what I am today.