Agamemnon's Daughter Read Free Page A

you?” I responded. “Still at N?”
    “Ah, let’s talk about something else!” he said in the same playful tone. “I’ve not been doing too well. Actually, it wasn’t so bad down there, but I did something stupid and got transferred to running amateur theatricals in the sticks.” “Really?”
    “Word of honor! I put on a play that turned out to contain no less than thirty-two ideological errors! Can you imagine? Well, that’s all ancient history now, and when all’s said and done I suppose I got off rather lightly.“
    My expression must have been hovering between amazement and disbelief, because he added: “You think I’m joking, but I’m telling you the plain truth, honestly.”
    And he went on in a lighthearted tone entirely devoid of self-pity or spite about his famous thirty-two ideological errors. It was as if he were delighted with the whole business and held it in secret admiration — though you couldn’t tell whether what he admired were the people who had had sufficient wisdom and patience to pick out each one of his errors, or himself, as a man who had not committed a trivial blunder or a mere peccadillo, but had engineered a disaster of such magnitude, or else both at the same time.
    “So that’s how it was,” he concluded. “Twenty-six they were, twenty-six; sand will never cover o’er their graves . . .”
    I’ve never known what those lines from Esenin were doing there. *
    Meanwhile, we had arrived at the crossroads where cardholders were to be finally segregated from commoners. In other circumstances, I would have done anything to avoid flashing my invitation in sight of a comrade still under sentence, but this time I had no option. It had to happen at the precise moment when he asked “And how are things with you?” As a result, smiling guiltily, and feeling more than a little embarrassed, I took the card from my pocket and blurted out: “As you can see, I’ve got an invitation to . . . I mean . . .”
    I didn’t know how to finish my sentence: humorously, or plainly, or by adopting an ironical stance prompted by — well, I don’t quite know what. It could have been me, or him, or the whims of fate. But he solved my dilemma by exclaiming brightly: “You’ve got an invitation! Bravo! Now that’s really good news. But shouldn’t you hurry up? Aren’t you late?”
    There wasn’t the slightest trace of mockery or repressed envy in his voice or on his face, and I felt sorry for having spent the last twenty-five yards worrying solely about how to get rid of the man.
    When I got to the other side of the crossroads, and just before reaching the first line of plainclothes police, I turned around one last time and saw him waving good-bye, still watching me with his sparkling eyes.
    I was upset by how nice he had been. However, the suspicion that his behavior was simply a sign of the implosion of a personality which, for reasons that are hard to explain, takes pleasure in its own downfall (in other circumstances, such a suspicion would have left an unpleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach) was swept away by his goodhearted and happy gesture, which made me all the more relaxed for my encounter with the first line of police.
    “ID!”
    From the corner of my eye, I watched the inspector’s glance going back and forth from my passport photograph to my face, as I tried (for reasons I cannot fathom) to detect in it some sign of disbelief, or ill will, or, on the contrary, respect. A few seconds later, as I left him behind me, I thought I must already be in an advanced state of mental degeneration to worry at all about the impression my face, my name, or my invitation card might make on an insignificant plainclothes policeman I would probably never see again in my life.
    Boulevard Marcel Cachin, which connects El-basan Road to the Grand Boulevard, was packed and at a standstill The only people who could get through, along the side, were people with invitations, moving individually,