The affair still divides the French and (from what I’ve read here and there) the rest of the world. Will they retry the case? Meanwhile, Dreyfus languishes in Cayenne. Serves him right.
I went to see Father Bergamaschi and found him tired and much aged. Hardly surprising—if I am sixty-eight, he must be eighty-five.
«Simonino,» he said, «I want to say goodbye. I’m returning to Italy, to end my days in one of our houses. I’ve worked enough for the glory of Our Lord. And you? You’re not going to get yourself into any more trouble? I live in fear of trouble. How simple it all used to be in your grandfather’s day—the Carbonari on one side, we on the other. Everyone knew who and where their enemies were. It’s not like that any longer.»
He is losing his mind. I gave him a fraternal embrace and left.
I went to see Father Bergamaschi and found him tired and much aged.
Yesterday evening I was passing in front of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. Sitting right by the main door was a human wreck, a blind cul-de-jatte, his bald head covered with livid scars. He played a strained melody on a pennywhistle that he held to one of his nostrils, while the other produced a dull hissing sound, as his mouth opened to take in breath, like someone who was drowning.
I don’t know why, but it frightened me. As if life were a terrible thing.
I cannot sleep. I have restless dreams in which Diana appears, pale and disheveled.
Often, rising at daybreak, I go out and watch the collectors of cigar stubs. They have always fascinated me. In the early morning I see them going about with their stinking sacks tied with a string to their waists and a stick with a metal spike that they use to harpoon the stub, even from under a table. It’s amusing to watch them being thrown out of the open-air cafés by the waiters, who sometimes spray them with a soda-water siphon.
Many collectors spend the night along the Seine embankment, and they can be seen in the morning, sitting on the quais, separating the tobacco, still moist with saliva, from the ash, or washing their shirts stained with liquid tobacco and waiting for them to dry in the sun while they continue their work. The bolder ones collect not just cigar butts but also cigarettes, where separating the damp paper from the tobacco is an even more disgusting task.
You also see them swarming around place Maubert and thereabouts, selling their wares and, as soon as they have earned a few cents, disappearing into a tavern to drink toxic alcohol.
I watch other people’s lives as a way of passing the time. I live the life of a pensioner, or a veteran.
It is strange, but I feel a certain nostalgia about the Jews. I miss them. Since my childhood I have constructed my Prague cemetery, stone by stone (you might say), and now it seems that Golovinsky has stolen it from me. Who knows what they are doing with it in Moscow? Perhaps they’re putting my Protocols together into a dry bureaucratic document devoid of its original setting. No one will want to read it. I’ll have wasted my life producing a testimony for no purpose. Or perhaps this is how my rabbis’ ideas (they were always my rabbis) will spread throughout the world and will accompany the final solution.
I read somewhere that there is a cemetery for Portuguese Jews at the far corner of an old courtyard in avenue de Flandre. A townhouse was built there at the end of the seventeenth century and belonged to someone called Camot, who allowed Jews, mostly Germans, to bury their dead there at a cost of fifty francs for adults and twenty for children. The house later passed to a man named Matard, an animal skinner who began burying the remains of his flayed horses and oxen next to the Jews, and the Jews protested. The Portuguese Jews bought an adjoining piece of land for their burials, and Jews from countries to the north found another place at Montrouge.
It closed early this century, but you can still visit. There are about twenty gravestones, some with Hebrew writing and others in French. I saw a strange one that read: «God Almighty has called me in the twenty-third year of my life. I prefer my situation to slavery. Here lies the blessed Samuel Fernandez Patto, died 28 Prairial of the second year of the one and only French Republic.» Precisely. Republicans, atheists and Jews.
The place is desolate, but it helped me imagine the Prague cemetery, which I have seen only in illustrations. I was a good narrator, I should have been an artist: from a few details I created a magical place, the sinister moonlit center of the universal conspiracy. Why did I let my creation slip out of my hands? I could have done so much else with it.
Rachkovsky has returned. He said he still needed me. I was annoyed. «You’re not keeping to the agreement,» I said. «I thought our score was settled. I gave you material never before seen, and you have kept quiet about the sewer. Indeed, it is I who am still owed something. You don’t imagine such valuable material was free.»
«It is you who’s not keeping to the agreement,» the Russian said. «The documents paid for my silence. Now you want money as well. Fine then, I won’t argue, the money will pay for the documents. So you still owe me something for my silence over the sewer. But I don’t think we should start haggling, Simonini. It is not worth your while. I told you it’s essential for France that the bordereau is regarded as genuine. But not for Russia. I could easily hand you over to the press. You’d spend the rest of your life in the law courts. Ah, I forgot. Just to get things clear about your past, I spoke to Father Bergamaschi and to Monsieur Hébuterne. They told me you’d introduced them to an Abbé Dalla Piccola, who had been involved in the Taxil affair. I tried to find him. It seems he’s vanished into thin air, along with everyone else who had been living in a house in Auteuil—except for Taxil himself, who’s wandering around Paris. He too is trying to find this missing clergyman. I could implicate you in his murder.»
«There’s no body.»
«There are four of them downstairs. Whoever put four bodies into a sewer could well have disposed of another one somewhere else.»
I was in the hands of that wretch. «Very well,» I said, «what do you want?»
«There’s one passage in the material you gave Golovinsky that I found fascinating: the plan to use the metropolitan railway to wreak havoc in the great cities. But for the argument to be believed, we need a few bombs to actually go off down there.»
«Where? London? There’s no metropolitan railway here yet.»
«They’ve started digging. There are excavations already along the Seine. You don’t have to blow up the whole of Paris. All I need is for two or three support beams to collapse, and if it demolishes a piece of the road, so much the better. A small explosion, but something that looks like a threat—and a confirmation.»
«I understand. But where do I come in?»
«You have already worked with explosives, and I understand you know a few handy experts. You have to look at things the right way. I’m sure everything will go off without incident—these first excavations are not guarded at night. But let us suppose, for some unfortunate reason, that the bomber is discovered. If he’s a Frenchman, he risks a few years in prison, but if he’s a Russian, it would start off a Franco-Russian war. It cannot be one of my men.»
I was about to become angry. I couldn’t be involved in something as crazy as this. I’m a man of peace, a man of a certain age. Then I stopped myself. What had been causing that emptiness I had been feeling for weeks, other than a sense of no longer being a protagonist?
By accepting this assignment I would be back in the front line. I would be helping to bring credit to my Prague cemetery, making it more probable and therefore more real than it had ever been. Once again, alone, I was defeating an entire race.
«I have to talk to the right person,» I replied. «I’ll let you know in a few days.»
I went to search out Gaviali. He still works as a rag-and-bone man, but thanks to my help, his papers are in order and he has some money set aside. Unfortunately, though, in less than five years he has aged badly—Cayenne leaves its mark. His hands shake and he struggles to lift his glass, which I generously fill several times. He has difficulty moving around, can hardly bend down, and I wonder how he manages to collect his rags.
He greets my proposal with enthusiasm: «It’s no longer like it used to be, when you couldn’t use some explosives because they didn’t give you the time to get away. Now everything’s done with a good time bomb.»
«How does it work?»
«Simple. You take any kind of alarm clock and set it to the time you want. When it reaches that hour, the alarm goes off, and instead of activating the bell, if you connect it properly, it activates a detonator. The detonator sets off the charge, and bang.
