John Berger - Lilac and Flag

In the toilet Hector took off his track suit and put on his dark blue uniform with gold epaulettes and a shirt with a buttoned-down collar. He was a Police Superintendent. He glanced into the mirror above the wash basin and adjusted his few strands of remaining hair. The thought of his retirement was troubling him, and every evening he tried to invent an excuse to stay late at the station. Off duty, he wandered around the offices, giving his opinion, asking questions, looking at old files. He was due to retire in three months. As Superintendent he allowed himself the eccentricity of wearing tennis shoes all day long. He pretended that at his age his feet suffered in leather. In truth, it was the silence of the tennis shoes that he liked. Now he walked stealthily down the corridor to his own room.

Behind his desk was a large cupboard of galvanised metal. He unlocked it. Such metal has no memory and is blind. From a pile of cassettes he selected one and, striding decisively across the floor, slid it into the VCR beneath the President’s portrait. Switching off the light over his desk so that the room was almost dark, he settled back in his swivel chair to watch the tape. It began with a crowd of people on a Métro platform. All the Métro stations in Troy, like the banks, were under video surveillance. The people on the platform were waiting for a train. Up above in the streets it was winter, the men and women were wearing overcoats and gloves. Some were reading newspapers, others were jiggling their legs to earphone rhythms. Most were looking blankly across the tracks at other people who had left work and who were waiting for a train to take them home in the opposite direction. It was the same every evening.

Their faces were sad. They hadn’t lost patience, but they’d lost heart. Perhaps heart comes back to them when they step out onto stations in distant suburbs and see the front windows of their houses, surrounded by trees, and lit up.

A little commotion begins. A man with a felt hat smashed onto the back of his head and a filthy overcoat too large for him goes to the edge of the platform. He has the determination of a man who believes too much in what he is doing. He is drunk. Under his arm he carries a carpet. Now he starts to point and shout at people. His gestures suggest he is insulting them. Yet his old man’s words are lost for ever, for the video is soundless.

Those he addresses pretend not to hear. Two women, when he pushes his way forward, walk away from him. He glances at them with a pained look and says something — as if now it is he who feels insulted. He rocks on his feet for consolation. Then he looks round for a distraction. He takes off his hat and waves at somebody, shouting again, this time with a smile. A man in a fur hat with a dispatch case looks up from his newspaper with disgust.

The Superintendent believed he was shouting a name — the name of the person he had just recognised on the opposite platform. During every viewing the Superintendent leant towards the video screen at this point, to try to lip-read the name. He believed it began with PON but he had never been able to decipher the last syllables.

There was a knock on the door. The Superintendent stopped the tape, switched on the light, leant back, placed his two hands on the armrests, and only then said:

Who is it?

Officer Albin reporting.

Come in.

The officer came in and saluted.

Well?

Washington Patrol have just picked up a runner.

Where is he?

In Reception.

How much did they find on him?

A hundred grammes.

Crack?

Crack, sir.

Is he talking?

No.

What name does he give?

Naisi.

Have we got tabs on him?

Not under that name.

Find out who he is and who feeds him.

Do you want to question him yourself, Superintendent?

Does he look cooperative?

Not yet.

Then I’ll see him later. Pass him over to Sergeant Pasqua and keep me informed.

Officer Albin was about to salute and leave the room when Hector raised one finger of his right hand to retain him. The gesture was both deliberate and nonchalant — what mattered was that it was received as a command. Officer Albin stood there waiting. Hector reflected upon how, in a few months’ time, no act of his would ever again be acknowledged as a command, and this thought brought a pain to his chest. Each day, as the date of his retirement approached, he felt more lost. He studied the wedding ring on his second finger. Officer Albin still waited.

Tell Sergeant Pasqua I won’t leave till he has something to tell me.

He flicked his finger almost invisibly, as a sign of dismissal.

Officer Albin saluted and turned. Hector listened to his footsteps receding along the stone corridor, then he extinguished the desk lamp and switched on the tape.

The people are still waiting for their train. A man wearing an overcoat with a black lamb’s wool collar and, around his neck, a white silk scarf, places his attaché case on the platform and squats down beside it. He opens the case and then stands upright, holding a shining butcher’s axe. His movements are decisive and calm. He jumps onto the tracks, crosses them, and leaps like an athlete up onto the platform beside the drunk old man with the carpet under his arm. The old man screws up his face like a baby. The man with the axe fells him with one terrible blow delivered to the back of the neck. The victim crumples and falls to the ground.

The assassin crosses the tracks again, puts the dripping weapon back in his attaché case, and walks slowly towards the exit at the end of the platform. The crowd separates to let him through.

No one makes a move or kneels down to help the old man. He lies sprawled on the platform in an empty circle. A train draws in. Then a second train. Their doors open. Passengers get on and off. The trains leave. On the deserted platform the corpse lies there, in its dark stain.

The victim’s name was Gilbert d’Ormesson. On the day following his murder, the police computer located his dossier in less than two minutes. D’Ormesson; born in Constantine, November 5, 1919; several arrests for drunken and disorderly behaviour; no fixed address; decorated with the Military Medal, 1945.

In the wallet found in his overcoat there was a photograph of a woman who looked like a cabaret artist, 1960s style. Clipped to this photo were three others of a black miniature poodle. On the back of one was written: Gilly, my love. After his death, no relative or acquaintance came forward.

Six months passed. Despite the hundreds of witnesses, the man with the butcher’s chopper was not identified. Hector toyed with the idea that the old man might have been involved in small-time blackmail. Yet when he listened to his lifelong experience, he knew now that the Métro murder would soon join the great majority of crimes: those which are unsolved.

Last night, down the road to the village, the frogs were returning to our lake by the rocks. Hundreds of thousands of them hopping towards the thawed green water. They converge on the lake from all sides, when the moon is waxing. In their haste to begin, the females hop with the males on their backs. Then they jump into the water together, and the couple stay attached for days, until the female lays her eggs, which the male, still on her back, still clutching her, fertilises as they drop into the water. They do this every year, unless there is a danger of their being too many. When this happens they stop mating. People wonder how frogs know. On summer nights in the lake they croak for hours on end, and the strength of their chorus tells them how many they are. When their croaking is too loud, they become chaste for a season.

If the Superintendent asked me, I could also explain to him the Métro murder. One morning, the killer placed a brand-new butcher’s chopper in his attaché case because he hoped to kill somebody. He did not yet know who. When he left home and kissed his wife goodbye, the extra weight in his attaché case upheld him. He walked jauntily to the station. It was not the first time he had left home with a chopper. In fact it was the seventh or eighth. He wanted to kill so his name would mean something for ever, so God would notice him. But he was not a man who could kill indiscriminately. On the other days, when he’d found no one to kill, he did his usual work in the office — he worked for an insurance company; he went to his usual café for lunch, and in the evening he came home on his usual train, as if carrying a butcher’s chopper wrapped in black satin in his attaché case was the most usual thing in the world. The black satin he’d found in his wife’s wardrobe. She had bought it eight years before to make into a nightdress, yet since their two children were born, she had given up making clothes for herself. The day he saw the old drunk on the Métro platform, his heart leapt with joy. His victim was there, he told himself. He knelt down on the platform to listen for a train. No, there was no train. This was the sign that God was willing. So he flew across the tracks. After he had killed the old man, he felt agreeably weak. As he climbed up from the lines onto the platform, he promised himself that he would take a taxi home. Which is what he did.