Free Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge Page B

she’d feigned belief and, lately, she’d been smothering fits of sobbing under her pillow. Sacha, who feared being alone with her — Sacha whom she pictured all alone with his opaque tragedy — packed her off to Mont Saint-Michel, to Nice, Cannes, Antibes, Juan-les-Pins on the least pretext: “Go look after your nerves, darling, I feel better facing all these worries alone …” Nadine at the seaside tried her best to read Proust, such penetrating novels, but what was the goal in life of all those people? She strolled along the beaches in the company of American ladies, an English boxer, flirtatious gentlemen dressed like fashion plates — and these people too had no goal in life, they served no purpose whatsoever, and the sight of them would have been demoralizing had it not been so ridiculous. She was invited to a pigeon shoot. Rigging yourself out in white flannels to perform serial execution on birds — how perverted! It made her sick. Only in small fishing ports, reading Zola, did she feel good.
    Sacha withdrew from her so as not to see in her eyes the anguish that tormented him too. “What’s going on? Weren’t all of these disgraced men trustworthy, intelligent, incorruptible? Where is this leading us? I can’t understand it anymore. I’ll soon stop believing in anything …” He’d only said that much, but with a look on his face that she would never forget. It was during their dismal night in Juan-les-Pins. Sacha had kept her away from Paris. “Keep as far from the job as you can, we’re going through a very bad moment,” which clearly meant “I don’t want you to die,” not that it would prevent anything … From time to time he telegraphed to arrange a meeting: two or three days of fresh air, two or three nights of lovemaking. The news must have been dire, because he was unable to unwind in Juan-les-Pins and when she came to bed beside him, naked, he noticed neither her new perfume nor her white enamel earrings — not even that her breasts were the firmer after a regime of massages and cold showers. Instead of making love, they conducted a frosty, fitful conversation — all in veiled allusions. “No, I’m not in a bad mood, darling …” “Then look at me, Sacha, and stop glowering. Do you love me?” Nadine felt ashamed of the breasts he didn’t see. “Yesterday I learned of three disappearances …” He gave three names. “Executed?” “Obviously, ah, you want me to dot the
i
’s …” “But why, why? Is it going to continue?” Nadine yanked the sheet over her shoulders, ashamed of her why’s which no longer made sense. He stubbed his cigarette out on the pillow where it made a small black hole, like a bullet’s, and stared at the mark with a strange laugh. “Why? You silly girl. Because they were old, well-known, and battle-hardened. Because they were in the way, because they knew as much as I do …” He swigged some whiskey straight from the bottle. Their bodies moved closer without heat, Nadine suppressed a shiver; they did not desire each other. Sacha was ruminating stolidly, eyes on the ceiling. Nadine thought (she was sure she only thought), “What about you? What about us?” and he answered her, “We’ll go the way of the others. The avalanche rolls onward, and we’re in its path. We count for nothing.” Nadine let the shivers overcome her. “Then let’s run, Sacha, escape anywhere!” There was an interminable lull before he shot back: “Stop talking drivel! It’s treason to run away. Me, a traitor? To save my own miserable skin, or your pretty skin, eh? And then what would we be left with? This old world we execrate? Pass the whiskey.” They took pills to be able to sleep … And now she was feeding the postcards from Juan-les-Pins into the fire.
    The other disaster, trifling by comparison, sliced into an open wound. No meeting with him tomorrow, no meeting ever again with those boyish clever eyes, that somewhat hard mouth, that wiry athlete’s body,