Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Much remained wavering, uncertain. I had a dream of Mother, incredulous, weeping, desolate, being knifed by the Herr General.

Journalists now listed him amongst those arraigned at Kiev as a war criminal. Should he have escaped with his life, he would be in some far-north slave camp. About his actual crimes they were silent. Dogged by old loyalties, I did not speak of him to Wilfrid until I joined him in Paris. ‘By your account,’ he said, ‘a gentleman of some irony, rather less of compassion.’

Loyalties matter, despite my Goethean pretensions of being the temperate, objective European. British and Germans must have perished in the war, all deeming themselves righteous.

Loyal, of course, to Wilfrid, I often, possibly too often, shrank from straining his patience, to over-impose. He had too many plausible identities – patrician factotum, cool philanthropist, wily ringmaster – for me to completely surrender to his kindness. His dislike of physical contacts, even handshaking – another Robespierre trait – could be forbidding. His activities were presumably charitable: he was reported amongst some prominent figures intervening for homosexuals rescued from the camps yet still interned, the Nazi sexual prohibitions inscrutably retained by the Allied administrators. I never enquired: friends, like inferior novelists, could know too much.

He was often absent, abroad for several weeks, returning without notice, greeting us as if he had never left. Such intervals were difficult, for Marc-Henri was unflaggingly peevish and aloof, jostling his hair, ungracious, hurriedly disappearing after meals. Virtually silent, I overheard him mutter, ‘I can do it. Myself.’ Wilfrid scrupulously kept balance between us, taking him to expensive restaurants, the Folies, bowling alleys, but failed to appease.

No matter. I had my labyrinth, winding back into other Paris summers. History was everywhere visible, so vibrant that it hurt. The streets paraded more than the wounds of Resistance and Collaboration. Abruptly confronting me, on the site of his home in the vanished rue des Cordeliers, reared an apparition, one arm upflung, the other protecting a child, a leg thrust forward, a rough, atrocious, defiant face, Danton’s statue. L’Audace . On Pont Neuf at sundown he had exclaimed, ‘Look! All that blood! The waters are turning scarlet!’ Later, instigator of the Revolutionary Tribunal, he had added that he sometimes felt chased by shades of the dead. In Musée Carnavelet, startling as Show Trial or Pact, was exhibited a long table glimmering with worn baize, at which the Committee of General Security had decreed lists for the string-haired Public Prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, whom Lenin admired and, in a manner, Uncle Joe had employed. But I was only obeying orders. On that table, agonized in his last hours, Robespierre had been dumped like rubbish.

I stood pilgrim in place de la Concorde, where another voyeur had watched the King’s execution, tasted the blood dripping from the scaffold and pronounced it vilely salt. Alongside rue Cassette was the Carmes convent, still revering a pile of skulls, where the September Massacres had gathered pace.

One afternoon, sultry and overcast, was appropriate décor for a particular mission, in which Marc-Henri would have choked in haste to lose interest. Mist distorted the Sainte-Chapelle almost to crookedness: then the vast blur of Notre Dame, looming as if supernaturally detached from moorings and about to drift down river. Outside, Templars had screamed in the fires of a monstrous frame-up.

I crossed quai de l’Horloge, past an optician’s exécution rapide , to a glistening heap of old, turreted buildings, to present a card signed by a grandee friend of Wilfrid. This procured reluctant admission to one of those black pockets of history lurking in all great cities, scraps from a séance. I was now within the Conciergerie, its crepuscular heights and depths overcharged with the dusty, inquisitorial stillness, sunless as if stricken by winter. No one escorted me, none was about, though a lesson from Meinnenberg was that I was never unwatched. Those who had suffered here – Corday, Marie-Antoinette, Danton, Chénier, Brissot – were no longer quite real, messy colours drifting into the blind.

Near by, off a grand staircase, would have been an apartment with sumptuous Gobelins carpets and that long green table, now at the Carnavalet, at which, in another Great Wrath, forerunners of Polit-Bureaux had legislated and argued for the Perfect Society. One ponderous arch opened on to a courtyard, cold, hemmed in by walls looking incomplete in the hanging mist, desolate as Nineveh. From a rusty tap Lucile Desmoulins and the Queen must have drunk. Buried near this chilled, sooty maze was the Tribunal Hall where Fouquier-Tinville had signed away lives. In my most humourless reaches I moved through a miasma of Gothic slabs, narrow steps twisting up to doors iron and padlocked, stone panels, grilled cells, sodden, almost fungoid oubliettes, cobwebbed tunnels lit only from slits. I heard, or thought I heard, a footfall, in a paralysis of time deranged as the Girondins’ last night.

My trail was not yet finished, so, on another day, in rue Saint-Honoré, between a hairdresser’s and bakery, with crisp, pungent smells, three youths joking over a photograph, I penetrated a drab passage to a yard faintly thickened by liquor and shadowed by old, two-storied houses. Ahead, from behind a faded green door throbbed orientalized jazz, high wails above measured drums. Visible through dirty rectangular glass, dark heads and shoulders of Algerians were ranked at a bar, the establishment bereft of the name that had once spread across Europe. Waiters in soiled white coats were crossing, re-crossing with tall glasses, from the radio the wails were prolonged, then collapsing into fragments of memory, always unresolved, beneath the apartment once owned by a sober, respected cabinet-maker, proud of his lodger, Maximilien Maria Isidore de Robespierre, whose gaze, like a searchlight, had once paralysed a deputy. ‘He’ll be suspecting I am thinking of something.’

‘Have you ever thought, Erich, of any of these new arrangements in West Germany? Some seem so exciting.’

Lisette, polishing silver, had spoken lightly, perhaps too lightly, for there might lurk a hint of reproach in the plump, motherly face, always so affectionate beneath the dark hair, which Wilfrid told her resembled a bursting bag. I knew that she preferred Marc-Henri to myself and suspected she was scheming to be rid of me, though at once admitting exaggeration of a proposal actually well meant.Yet she persisted.’ Herr Wilfrid has often told me of how you helped in… that place.You told stories, people listened, they were calmed…’

As if repenting of indiscretion or untoward interference, she gave me another smile, still more motherly, pressed my hand, polished a knife with sufficient energy to recharge a battery.

True, I was idle, in an era of recovery, rebuilding, rehabilitation, the fresh breath of revival. But Lisette had chosen a bad day.Wilfrid was always receiving parcelled documents, cuttings, transcriptions, some of which he might leave open on a table, certainly not for Marc-Henri, for whom Final Solutions, Pacts, Show Trials were at best worth a shrug. They would frequently be absurd or whimsical. A murderer from Alsace had offered Laval as character reference. An SS lieutenant on trial was pleading that the hanging of gypsies during the Thirty Years War gave legal precedent for his own disposal of four thousand Jews. Wilfrid himself could be tempting me to venture abroad by providing novels by young German writers – Grass, Böll – humane but realistic, harsh to their elders. Certainly, he, very courteous, very grateful, declined my offers to assist him, filing, paraphrasing, carrying messages, as if anxious to spare me tedium best left to the ageing.