"Yes, it was extremely interesting," I said, echoing her tone of voice.
She shook my hand, tugging on it slightly, which obliged me to lean over a little.
"It was quite true what you said about the German-Soviet pact," she said, screwing up her eyes as a mark of complicity.
"Well, it wasn't actually me who…"
"And then that… what was it you were saying? Katyn! What a story! Mind you, I've never trusted the Poles."
"Yes, well, but, it was really the Russians there, who…"
"My daughter has a Russian friend, you know, a delightful young woman, very cultivated. She speaks three or four languages. She's been everywhere. You must meet her some time. She plays the violin as well."
After hearing this detail I listened to the rest of the story distractedly. The violinist used to remark, "Scratch a Russian and you'll find a Tartar underneath." This turn of phrase delighted the girl-wife. Listening to her, I was waiting for a pause in the rhythm of her breathing that would enable me to take my leave. But the reserves of breath in that puny chest seemed inexhaustible. "Scratch a Pole, you know, and you'll find a…," she drew me toward her to round off her verdict. "Oh, but some of them are not like that at all!" I protested vainly.
At that moment among the groups of couples behind the girl-wife, I saw a man's face in profile that seemed to me both familiar and unrecognizable. I stared at him. The profile seemed to be smiling at someone other than the person he was talking to. I taxed my memory but before I could fix on either a name or a place, the face disappeared behind the moving throng of guests.
Between the end of one story and the immediate start of the next I succeeded in slipping in a brief word of good-bye and dove back into the crowd, wresting my hand away from the storyteller's grasp. The pact. Katyn. The terrible reputation of the Poles. This drawing room farrago, I told myself, was an indirect response to the lies of those hypnotists of memory. I saw them together, the filmmaker and the intellectual, a little apart from the others. A snatch of a sentence from their conversation cut through the din: "We'll get Jean-Luc's write-up tomorrow and then on Thursday…"
In the concierge's lodge the television was flickering with the last minutes of a match. Standing on the threshold the man looked both weary and still buffeted by the excitement of the game. "Four one! I've never seen anything like it!" he exclaimed, noticing my glance at the screen and in no doubt that one could hardly fail to be surprised by this score. I realized that the match had been broadcast during the screening of the film.
Near the exit a knot of people gathered, the one that forms at the end, the most talkative one, the slowest to disperse. I was waiting for these guests to slip, one by one, through the bottleneck of the door. Suddenly, disturbingly, for the second time I caught sight of a man's face, that discreetly smiling profile, whose smile, it was now clear to me, seemed aware of my presence. Like me, the man was waiting for the crowd to depart. I took a few steps toward him. He turned his head slightly. It was Shakh.
"There must be a stage door somewhere." Shakh spoke these words softly, as if to himself, and, avoiding the throng that was still blocking the exit, he began to climb a staircase at the end of the foyer. I followed him.
We found ourselves on the balcony of a glass-enclosed mezzanine floor that circled the room, which was already half empty of guests. The voices floating up sounded like those of vendors at the end of a street market, pointlessly loud and shrill among a mere handful of shoppers. You could also hear a series of suction-cup sounds, good-bye kisses accompanied by meows of politeness. The staff were moving the tables, rearranging the armchairs. As he walked along, Shakh looked at the room then turned, and I saw a weary expression on his face that seemed to be saying: "It's a hopeless case!"
No doubt he knew this other exit that led us out, as is often the case with cinema buildings, into a nighttime street in which it is difficult at first to recognize the building fronts. "I listened to your speech for the defense just now," he said, when we were settled in a brasserie. "And I was certainly the only one listening," he added with a slight smile. We sat for a moment without speaking. Outside the windows of the brasserie groups of young people were parading past, celebrating their team's victory with loud chanting and the waving of brightly colored flags.
"Yes, I listened to you, but I'd actually come to meet one of the film's sponsors… Would you like to guess who?"
"Some official in the Ministry of Culture who finances pseudo-documentary rubbish like this with the French taxpayer's money?"
"No, you're not even close."
"A former left-winger who's become a press magnate and is still campaigning against Soviet imperialism?"
"Not that either. I can see that, after years of idleness, you're losing your touch. Next guess."
"No idea. Someone I know?"
"A man you've met and who in those distant days used to be called Mr. Scalper. We always used to joke about how well the name suited him. Do you remember? Well, you knew him better than I did."
"Yes, it all comes back. Ron Scalper, the arms dealer with almost artistic tastes. He used to leave two or three days before the killing started. It was as if he could smell the blood. And he had the habit of saying to the Peeping Toms who stayed behind to film the performance of his guns, 'Get some black-and-white pictures for me, with Africans in them. That generally turns out best.' We really wanted to scalp him. So has he moved into arts sponsorship?"
"Well, he's been hugely successful since then. He runs a big American firm with several arms factories, a research institute, and some specialist journals. For rocket launchers he's one of the best in the world."
"But that film? Is he trying to redeem himself or what? I can hardly see him shedding tears, not even crocodile ones, over the mass graves in the camps."
"No, the film is simply high-class publicity. They have a department that looks after all this agitprop. The competition's very fierce in the arms trade, as you well know. It's no longer enough to show films shot by the Peeping Toms intended for a few officials. You have to work in-depth on public opinion in a country. Get people used to the idea that it's always been the Americans who came to the rescue and that these days the Russians can't even make a decent saucepan. The whole of Eastern Europe is going to be reequipped with American arms. Contracts worth tens of millions. Very soon the Americans won't have a single man on welfare. So it's worth financing a few films and running a few little wars, here and there, just to test the product."
"And all that high society who were there just now. Do you think they'll remember anything about the film tomorrow?"
"Ah, products like that aren't designed to make people remember but to make them forget. Forget the battle of Moscow, forget Stalingrad, Kursk. I've talked to the sponsor: the next episode's already in production. It's going to be called The Soldiers of Liberty. El Alamein, battles in the Pacific, the Normandy landings, the liberation of Europe -and that's the whole of the Second World War. And above all, not a word about the Eastern front. It never existed. Furthermore, and he told me this in all seriousness, ' El Alamein was the first great victory, the real turning point in the war!' In their war, that is."
Shakh lowered his voice, smiled at me, and added in apologetic tones, "There! I've started repeating your speech for the defense." He fell silent, then, doubtless not wishing to leave the impression of a man who had lost his cool, continued in tones where no rancor could now be heard, "You know, when all's said and done, this trafficking in the past may also be a way for them to avoid thinking about it. I grumble because I've seen tank tracks covered in ground meat at the battle of Kursk. I remember the rainstorm beating down on those thousands of tanks that evening, the water boiling and rising up from the burning steel in clouds of steam. But dinosaurs like me will soon be gone. As for the new generation, try talking to them about Kursk. It would spoil their joie de vivre. Look at that idiot, he's going to get himself run over."