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By Root 853 0

surprise, Alfred notices that the police officer he turns to when he notices the grim way people are staring at him is sporting a magnificent gold tooth. The curate who gives him refuge has received a new bell for his church. Everyone gets televisions and washing machines. Unlimited supplies of pilsner. Prosperity at all levels. You get the point. As the old lady predicted, the entire village has begun, just begun, to let itself be bought. “That Alfred, after all … Isn’t the old woman somewhat right? Didn’t he behave like a swine at the time? And even today. Look at him even today. First off, he’s an ugly bastard, we never realized what an ugly, two-faced look he had … And then, doesn’t he understand the awful situation the town is in? He was there the other day when she made her proposal. He understood just as we did that all that was needed was a word from him, a gesture, for our prosperity to return and Forge X and Mill Y to be saved. Of course we acted indignant; it was a question of principle. But what about him? Why didn’t he make the gesture? Why does he not sacrifice himself for this city, which he says he loves? He says it’s unjust, that it would be an injustice to give in to that old lunatic’s caprice. But where does the injustice lie, I wonder. Can you really talk about injustice when a whole community can be saved? What an egotist. What a bad lot. And what fools we are to be so kind.” I’m not so sure of the details. But that’s how it goes, in general. And there’s poor Alfred in the last scene, assassinated in a corner of his grocery store, shabbily strangled, while, as the price for this small injustice, happy order returns to Güllen.

I know writers who identify with Céline, Proust, Paul Morand, Drieu, Montherlant, Romain Gary.

I even have a friend, not a bad writer, who, when he’s not feeling well, declaims in front of his mirror the “Ode à Jean Moulin” by André Malraux.

But on my good days it’s Solal I think of, in his cave, abandoned by everyone except his dwarf.

On the bad ones I’m haunted by the destiny of Dürrenmatt’s grocer, not a real bastard, not entirely innocent, assassinated by a crowd of his fellow men.

At times I also think of the story (a true one in this case, and it has pursued me since it was revealed a dozen years ago by a Swiss historian) of Marc Bloch, whose “great friend” Lucien Febvre implored him to give in to the Germans, who were asking for just one thing, one small thing, to authorize the republication of the journal Annales,* and to consent to having his name removed from the journal’s list of contributors. What? Febvre grew impatient. Bloch was hesitating, complaining? Weighing the pros and cons, moralizing, flaunting his high principles, quibbling? What selfishness! What an inflated ego! What a lack of any sense of or concern for the common good! Naturally, Bloch eventually gave in. But what prevarication, what complications before finally going over to the only worthwhile view. What a prick.

I repeat that all this makes no sense.

It’s almost unseemly to identify with Marc Bloch, who was ultimately executed by the Nazis.

And I authorize you to object that there is something about these ghosts that tends to undermine what I told you the last time about my inability to experience and see myself as a victim.

But that’s how it is. I suppose we’re all entitled to our little contradictions. Moreover, in my defense I’d say that there is my daytime thinking, my conscious, everyday life, where being a victim has no place, and then there’s my other, nocturnal life, not usually acknowledged, where I’m less proud and endlessly vulnerable.

In any case, that’s the truth.

This is my primal and secret scene, my obsession, my nightmare.

And that was my fifteen minutes of being pathetic or paranoid, as you will.

*Reference to The Good Soldier Švejk, a novel by the Czech author and humorist Jaroslav Hašek, acclaimed as one of the great satires of world literature. Set during the First World War, the novel relates a series of adventures in which Švejk manages to outwit various bureaucrats