Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Once she darted, as if alarmed, into a sepulchral bouquiniste in rue de Seine, hurriedly rummaging, head cocked, mouth pursed amongst embroidered stools, cracked busts, chess-sets, snuff-boxes, yellowing prints that Mirabeau could have seen. First charming, then dismaying the patronne , she purchased nothing, refusing my offer of a jade dragon she particularly liked, then pouting at my refusal to buy for Wilfrid a Maltravé harp with all strings missing. She ridiculed my interest in a waxen bouquet under a glass dome, old, yet fresh as if just delivered to some finely laundered hand. Hoch die Kaiserin. Vive l’Impératrice. We surged into hilarity at hearing of a Pittsburgh magnate received in audience at the Vatican and wondering whether to tip the Pope; at excavations in the Saint-Anne-des-Bois nunnery producing a quorum of baby bones; at the gypsy gaoled for impersonating Victor Mature and subscribing his profits to a group demanding unilateral French disarmament; a parrot outside Saint-Sulpice squawking ‘Money Talks’. Our frictions still thrilled. A swift red tinge in the Bois, a fox; Certainly not. She stamped. ‘You never agree. You’re Prussian, know nothing of pain. No, not Prussian. You are…’ her small face tightened, as if to spit, I brace myself for the knock-out, ‘ English! ’ Then caressing me, not repentant but instantly forgetting. But once, following mirth at a woman arguing with a dog, she clenched hands, muttering in coarse, unidentifiable patois. ‘I’ve a right to be present,’ glaring at me but surely accusing someone else. ‘I don’t need certificate for breathing. It’s you that’s bad breath.’

The nearer one approaches, the more the other recedes, at times, goaded by her talkative reticences; I remembered a message from one of Wilfrid’s thick books, that, approaching a woman, you should not forget the whip. An approach to Suzie best left unstated.

Bed hovered above our jaunty duels, an instrument waiting to be played. My body stung, but she was reshaping me. I was finding capacities for outright laughs, for showing emotion, for turning shoulder to the violent, suffering past. Her gibes enlivened.

‘Like German philosophers…’ she named none, ‘you’re too slow. That’s not incurable.’ Then glimmered with caustic amusement. ‘ Bon appetit when you sharpen your crayon.’ Tantalizing in ambiguity, enclosing my literary hopes, which I exaggerated with her, my dislike of ‘commitment’, my sexual awkwardness. Foreheads touching, hands brushing, a glance reproachful or affectionate was part of a campaign of mined terrain, camouflaged marsh, sunken roads, deceptive salience, misread maps, injudicious feints, raids that might explosively recoil. Many battles are fought from mistaken premises, as though, by gnawing a book, a dog learns to read Nietzsche.

Marc-Henri, guessing more than was comfortable, advised with swarthy sans-culotte animality, his glibness hinting at unwholesome practices. ‘You should never let them know you’re satisfied, expect their gratitude, admit needing pity.’

August closed in blue heat. Wilfrid, digressing from the Conference, a fortnight ahead, suggested that, just possibly, I might care to accompany him to Bonn. ‘A few matters to dispose of. Not of the first importance, conforming to the Spanish proverb that cash in the pocket is a good Catholic. You might care to meet…’ Adenauer, no doubt, Otto John, Willi Brandt. In post-masturbation ennui I reflected that the excursion would cancel several dates elsewhere and mumbled neither assent nor refusal, though his appreciative smile intimated that he accepted the latter. Shamed by his acknowledgement of the superior claims of my own business, I at once – And then – wished to retract, but, waiving all claims, he had already smiled himself away. That he might genuinely need my company did not then occur to me. I preferred to be shrinking from his anxiety to procure me some post in the Allied Administration, a UN commission, a chance to trail some ex-Nazi aspirant to high office or, such was his taste, that I should apply for a bishopric.

Self-accusations of lethargy, shirking, lack of being, nagged like a cyst. Once, in a sort of cabin fever, I had craved to pursue the girl who ran, ride with the Herr General to feast with the Reichsmarschall, tramp the Black Forest seeking Erl-King or slim huntress. This had shrunk to hopes of a pert French girl opening her legs. On Wilfrid’s departure, with Paris seething with Conference anticipations and discord, I was splayed with images of foreboding. A withered hand upheld at crossroads, tests set by dwarf with a secret name, an insignificant quest, a bladed wind against which I was powerless to struggle. A foreboding as though dredged from wayward childhood reading and displaying, hung over Paris, the black hood and yellow claws of an Exterminating Angel.

Severely suited prominentes moved in informal measures with Special Correspondents, Academicians, Toute Vie initiates, embassy officials, preparing to nudge the future. Emblems shone – a starry French African robe, a green turban – bows and handshakes were being exchanged, affable demeanours were tinged with some complacency. The spectacle swelled to a champagne bubble, voices almost sang, in diffusions of delicate pink and flecked-gold light beneath a lofty Renaissance ceiling enscrolled with a further Conference, naked celestials languidly conversing at a forest pool, while putti dodged between roseate clouds. In contrast, on a green marble pillar, discreetly illuminated, presided a blown-up portrait of a head: bald crown, grooved face narrowing towards the chin, powerful eyes. Ernst Wiechert, recently dead, whose home had, notoriously, been plundered by French occupation troops in Germany. East Prussian schoolteacher and famed novelist, much admired by Wilfrid, Iron Cross veteran, sent to Buchenwald for treason, he had once urged massed students, watched by Himmler himself, to unite in global fellowship, respect for truth, individual freedom, an imagination free of past angers.

Amongst the students could have been the Scholl brother and sister, of the White Rose. To Himmler’s visible fury, Wiechert confessed that he saw some good in his enemies, blemishes in his friends. Austere, stubborn, his etherealized presence sanctioned whatever might come.

From outside, commotion, now a heaving growl, now a single outcry. That morning Humanité had red headlines accusing the Conference as cat’s paw of the Pentagon and CIA. An article by Sartre ‘in the spirit of the Resistance’ had declared that by being anti-revolution the Conference must be anti-life, was today countered by another, signed ‘AC’, identified as Camus, comparing Sartre’s resistance to the Occupation to the tail-wag of a mouse. The transport strike had not occurred, though rumours of bombs and raucous demonstrations caused the police to line the forecourt. Picasso’s communist Dove of Peace was pasted on walls, memorials, doors. The week had pulsed with threats and recriminations. Lifts, stairs, corridors were guarded by police, un-uniformed hirelings, vigilantes. An envelope on the pavement could contain powder, church bells be a tocsin.

Marc-Henri, throughout, was dourly unconcerned. ‘Sensible fellow,’ Wilfrid said, though I, too, remained much the same.

Wilfrid had departed before breakfast, so I left unaccompanied. Fearing the disorders, I would have carried a knobbed stick but for anticipation of an ironic lift of his eyebrow and offer of an escort with cannon.

The immediate streets were dense with police, attempted pickets, rival partisans. Sliding through shaken fists, hoots, stamping, I was soon rather pompously exhilarated, as though at last under fire. Banners jostled, a Red wind: Yanks Go Home, Peace Without Dollars, Jerusalem for the Arabs . I sniffed history from faces swollen and enflamed as Marat’s, stampedes from the old Revolutionary Sections – Saint-Antoine, Faubourg Saint-Monceau – howls for the Republic of Equals, a whiff from Les Halles pungent as the Chicago stockyards. Braced by the uproar, I hoped I was proud, composed, subtly within great events. Wedged in one street, agitators of the Right-wing UDCA, pledged against Marxist Jews and traitors, were waving placards agitating against internationalism and demanding the rights of small shopkeepers in a purified France. Such crowds gave fierce tonic to the loves and hatreds jostling within the giant skull of Europe, my sudden fervour delighting in such phrases.