The Kindly Ones

You might be wondering how I ended up in the lace business. Nothing particularly marked me out for commerce, far from it. I studied law and political science and received my doctorate in law; in Germany the letters Dr. jur. form a legal part of my name. Yet it must be said that circumstances played a part in preventing me from making use of my diploma after 1945. If you really want to know, nothing truly marked me out for law, either: as a young man I wanted above all else to study literature and philosophy. But I was prevented from doing so; another sad episode in my family romance—maybe I’ll come back to it at some point. But I have to admit that when it comes to lace, law is more useful than literature. Here’s what happened, more or less. When it was all over, I managed to slip into France, to pass myself off as a Frenchman; in all the chaos, it wasn’t too difficult. I returned along with the deported, we weren’t asked many questions. It must be said that I speak perfect French; that’s because I had a French mother; I spent ten years of my childhood in France, I went through middle school there, then high school, preparatory classes, and even two years of university, at the ELSP, and since I grew up in the South I could even muster a Provençal drawl, but in any case no one was paying attention, it was a real mess, we were greeted at the Gare d’Orsay with some soup, some insults too—I should say that I hadn’t tried to pass myself off as a camp inmate, but as an STO worker, and the Gaullists didn’t like those too much, so they roughed me up a little, the other poor bastards too, and then they let us go, no Hotel Lutetia for us, but freedom at least. I didn’t stay in Paris, I knew too many people there, and not the right ones, so I wandered around the countryside and lived off odd jobs here and there. And then things calmed down. They soon stopped shooting people, and then they didn’t even bother putting them in jail anymore. So I started looking around and I ended up finding a man I knew. He had done well for himself, he’d managed the change of regime without a hitch; being a man of foresight, he had taken care not to advertise his services on our behalf. At first he refused to meet me, but when he finally realized who I was, he saw that he didn’t really have a choice. I can’t say it was a pleasant conversation: there was a distinct feeling of embarrassment to it, of constraint. But he clearly understood that we had a common interest: I, to find a job, and he, to keep his. He had a cousin up North, a former broker who was trying to start up his own business with three Leavers bought off a bankrupt widow. This man hired me as a salesman; I had to travel and find customers for his lace. This work exasperated me; I finally managed to convince him that I could be more useful to him in management. I did indeed have quite a bit of experience in that field, even though I could make even less use of it than of my doctorate. The business grew, especially in the 1950s, when I renewed my contacts in the Federal Republic and succeeded in opening up the German market for us. I could easily have gone back to Germany then: many of my former colleagues were living there peacefully; some of them had served a little time, others hadn’t even been charged. Given my record, I could have resumed my name, my doctorate, claimed my veteran’s and disability benefits, no one would have noticed. I would easily have found work. But, I said to myself, what would be the point? Law didn’t really interest me any more than business, and I had actually come to acquire a taste for lace, that ravishing, harmonious creation of man. When we had bought up enough looms, my boss decided to set up a second factory, and he put me in charge of it. I have kept this position ever since, and will until I retire. In the meantime, I got married, rather reluctantly I must admit, but up here, in the North, it seemed necessary, a way of fitting in and consolidating my situation. I picked a woman from a good family; she was relatively good-looking, a proper sort of woman, and I immediately got her with child, to keep her busy. Unfortunately she had twins, it must run in the family, mine, I mean—one brat would have been more than enough for me. My boss lent me some money, I bought a comfortable house, not too far from the sea. And that is how the bourgeoisie finally made me one of its own. It was better that way. After everything that had happened, I craved calm and predictability above all. The course of my life had crushed the bones of my childhood dreams, and my anguish had slowly smoldered out, from one end of German Europe to the other. I emerged from the war an empty shell, left with nothing but bitterness and a great shame, like sand crunching in your teeth. So a life in keeping with all the social conventions suited me fine: a comfortable strait-jacket, even if I often contemplate it with irony, and occasionally with contempt. At this rate, I hope someday to reach Jerome Nadal’s state of grace, and to strive for nothing except to strive for nothing. Now I’m becoming bookish; another one of my failings. Alas for saintliness, I am not yet fully free of desire. I still honor my wife from time to time, conscientiously, with little pleasure but also without excessive disgust, so as to guarantee the peace of my household. And every now and then, during business trips, I go to the trouble of renewing some of my old habits—but mainly as a matter of hygiene, so to speak. All that has lost much of its interest for me. The body of a beautiful boy, a sculpture by Michelangelo, it’s all the same: they no longer take my breath away. It’s like after a long illness, when food has lost all taste; what then does it matter if you eat chicken or beef? You have to feed yourself, that’s all. To tell the truth, there isn’t much that has kept an interest for me. Literature, possibly, but even then, I’m not sure if that’s not just out of habit. Maybe that’s why I am writing these memoirs: to get my blood flowing, to see if I can still feel anything, if I can still suffer a little. A curious exercise indeed.