And There Was Light Read online

  The philosophers put my brain to work, and my brain followed them willingly. The discipline they imposed on it strengthened its muscles. My brain used its powers better, and found its way faster from day to day, but it never reached port. I heard questions everywhere, but answers never.

  Our philosophy teacher was very weak that year. The poor man had aged badly. Fortunately, there were the books, and we discussed them among ourselves with a passion which was new to me.

  EXASPERATING VAPORS SEEMED TO BE RISING from occupied Paris, lying there as silent as the tomb. All the words that people held in because they were frightened were turning to defiance. Almost all the boys my age were worried. Those who weren’t were fools, and we dropped them. Our uneasiness was more intense than the uneasiness of people fully grown. It did not consist in asking ourselves who would win the war and when, whether there would be food rationing — indeed there would, it was already beginning — whether the more dangerous enemy was Nazism or Bolshevism. For our part, we wanted to learn how to live, and that was a much more serious matter. And we wanted to learn fast, because we felt that the next day it would surely be too late. There were signs of death on land and in the air, from the Spanish border to the frontiers of Russia. Not just signs but battles to the death.

  The feeling grumbled inside us, pressing to come out in the open. Unless we were up to making a better life than the life of our elders, the orgy of stupidity and killing would go on till the end of the world. Let people be silent if they were able to go on living without speaking out. We were incapable of it. As for that fear of theirs, it was indecent, and made us feel sick. We had no forbearance toward the philosophers, our teachers or our families. It was better so, since we needed our strength to prepare ourselves.

  Students were very serious that winter in Paris. Some of them even had the tragic look. And why not? On November 11, 1940, there had been a demonstration on the Champs-Elysées, in memory of the 1918 victory, which refused to be snuffed out. That was the first demonstration, the first and only time that the Parisians had said no to Germany. The students had done it, and next morning at dawn some twenty of them had been shot.

  Most people were still laughing and having a good time. The balance of life is not destroyed at once in one season. But each morning we woke up having lived weeks, though we didn’t know how, since the day before.

  In a happy land children never stop being children. But those who live in a land of suffering are men even before they want to be, before their bodies allow it. They still have the mouth of the ten-year-old ready to pull a long face, the brightness of tears in their eyes, ink on their fingers, the slang of schoolboys, and little girls they have not touched bothering their heads. Yet they are already men, with a zeal for understanding and doing which must be assuaged without delay. They have a thousand times as many questions as there are answers the world over.

  I was like that, and so were my companions. We were gulping down our studies for want of more solid food. But, at any rate, we were not taken in by words, by science or philosophy, by newspapers, complacency or fear. We were afraid of not living, no doubt about that, of not having the right or the time for it, and afraid of people telling us we must do it this way but not that. As if they knew! We were in a hurry and we were determined. In spite of everything we were going to give life a try.

  Leaving my house there were two of us as there always had been. But by the time we got to the lycée we were eight or ten or twelve. It never failed. My companions converged on us from all the streets along the route. Some of them even went a long way out of their way to join us. The concierge at the lycée, who was much amused at the sight, used to stick his head out of the window at the gate and call out: “Well, well. So it’s the Lusseyran parade.”

  In a way it was my parade, for under the broad guiding hand of Jean I was always in the middle. Sometimes the presence of the others became almost a nuisance. From now on, to recapture our old intimacy, Jean and I had to retreat to my apartment, to the two little rooms, my monkish cell in the Boulevard Port-Royal.

  Outside there was always the crowd. “You attract them,” was Jean’s way of putting it. “They need you.” I, who thought it was I who needed them. After all, perhaps it was a little of both. The mysteries of attraction have never been solved. But Jean went on, “Don’t you realize you are the one they are always looking at? Even when it is difficult, when they have to look over the shoulder of the boy next to them? They think you don’t see them. Maybe that’s why they do it.”

  Our procession went down the Rue St-Jacques and then climbed up again, side by side but with no confusion. Sometimes I wondered where all this order came from. Everyone talked in his turn. There was a time for joking and a time to be serious. All the boys were so levelheaded, and when they were excited they were so secretive about it that it was as if they were lining up in battle formation. Whatever happened there was always one subject that was taboo — school. By unanimous vote the one who talked about that had to leave the procession. Serious questions had priority, and how serious we were! Even when we were talking about girls.

  I walked in the middle and was happy, without knowing exactly why — happy to be with men who, like me, were not willing to shut their eyes to life. I completely forgot we were going to the lycée. Once I was in school I forgot I was in class. I was already walking in the midst of the future. Yet I had no idea what the future would bring.

  François, one of the boys in the parade, was born in France, but his family was Polish and poor. His father had emigrated twenty years before, and had become a metal worker in one of the factories in the north of France.

  François was full of ardor. In itself that would not have been enough to single him out among us, for the temperature of our group was high. But his ardor was different, as we used to say, “in the Slavic manner.” Emotions flashed from his tall thin body — perhaps a shade too thin — like a battery discharging. They caused him to make motions he could not control; to fold his arms across his chest, put his hands on your shoulders while he was talking, always on a level with your face and in a voice that was inspired and rounder and warmer than other people’s; made him stop suddenly in the middle of the street two steps ahead of the others and greedily hold us there crying, “Life is beautiful,” or something very like it. François was celebrating his private Mass.

  Did I say he had a passion? The fact is he had all the passions, but the greatest of them all was his passion for France. He loved his country, and seemed to know it better than we did. Sometimes he called it France in the usual way. Sometimes he called it Poland. For him it came to the same thing, and for my part I thought he was right.

  In the presence of our teachers we had to pretend and we hated it. We had to look reasonable — how shall I put it — detached. Our fire had to be turned down low, except with the man who was so different from the others, our history teacher. He wanted us to be exactly as we really were, funny if we couldn’t help it, furious if we were angry. This remarkable character was as much alive after six months as he was on the first day. His learning made us gasp. He made numbers and facts pour down on us like hail. Every now and then he rubbed his hands in a lively and happy way, and laughed a small friendly laugh. We were beginning to know him well, and saw that that meant an idea had occurred to him.

  The syllabus for history stopped at 1918, with the kind of nearsighted caution people thought suitable for courses in school. But for him that was no obstacle, for he would go ahead without any syllabus. He went on past all the barriers, even after the hour for the end of school. If he knew we were not scheduled for other courses he kept us an hour, even two hours longer. Smiling, he announced: “I am not keeping you. Those who want to leave may do so. It’s all right with me.” Naturally, we all stayed, consumed by that unbelievable whirlwind of facts, information, new angles on all the countries and all the periods; and by his pleas for clarity, common sense, energy and alertness. All of us, that is, except two. We had no
ticed them, for they went out right on the hour. It was not long before we found out that they had enrolled in a youth movement for collaboration with Germany.

  As soon as they had closed the door behind them, the teacher said, “Now we are among friends, let us go on.” He followed the history of Germany beyond the defeat of 1918, through the Weimar Republic, Stresemann, the venerable Hindenburg, inflation, strikes, misery and the failure of the Social Democrats, all the way down to Hitler’s Putsch and the birth of the Nazi monster, which was weighing down upon us now with all its strength.

  He told us about the Reichstag fire and the people who were really responsible for it, about the creation, in 1933, of a place unique in history for the scientific organization of cruelty: Dachau, a concentration camp, six miles from Munich in Bavaria.

  From his worn briefcase be pulled out incredible documents, whole pages translated from Mein Kampf, the statements of Alfred Rosenberg, Joseph Goebbels, Julius Streicher — all the teeming nightmares of National Socialist Germany. He made it clear to us that this was race murder and how they went about it — not in theory but here and now and in actual practice, and not so far away from us, in Poland and in Czechoslovakia. Though François was not Jewish, I could hear him grumble in protest.

  Our teacher had no fear, and what a deliverance that was! Whatever choice he had made in this war of ours, he knew the reason for it. And he would not take leave of us until he had told us the whole story. At last, one day, he met us head on. He asked us what France was, what it was good for, what part it was playing in the world. We had to answer, for his questions were not just rhetorical.

  As might be expected, François spoke more eloquently than the rest of us. He said that France had just been beaten, but that that meant nothing, only that there was a general infection in the body of Europe. This infection must be cured, or else the world, the whole world, would be poisoned from the same source. And besides, said François — he was almost on his feet because he couldn’t keep his seat — France was not just a country, it was a way of life. While this was going on, our teacher was rubbing his hands with more conviction than ever.

  To him it seemed clear that François was right. France had to be loved, but with intelligence, and that was the hard part. We must recognize that the French Empire was wounded, perhaps dead, and times were changing fast with the balance of power turning on its own axis. There was no denying that Germany, for all its Gestapo and its Wehrmacht, was not the whole of the problem but only a part of it.

  He wanted us to look beyond frontiers because, as he said, frontiers were only the bones of an old corset which was about to burst. His sentences were interrupted by the familiar laughter we had come to love so much. “Young gentlemen,” he said, “this is not a war of nations. There will be no more wars of that sort. Get that into your heads! The world is one. That may be uncomfortable, but it is a fact. And every nationalist is behind the times, just an old stick-in-the-mud.”

  Fascinated, we followed him across the frontiers, eastward toward Russia and westward toward America. As he saw it, only those two countries counted now, the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. The power of Germany was of the moment, nothing but a gigantic frenzy. It could not last.

  The Russians and the Americans might not be any better than other people, but they were certainly more alive, and in the end life was always what mattered. The U.S.S.R. and the U.S. were not at war yet, but they would be. That was not just a hope but the inevitable sequence of events.

  Then for six weeks he devoted himself to explaining the birth of Bolshevism, the rule of Lenin, the rule of Stalin and the Moscow purges. For our benefit he analyzed the constitution of the U.S.S.R., relying upon the Russian texts which he had had translated. He made it plain that for a good three years Russian heavy industry, concentrated in the region south of Moscow and around the cities of the Ukraine like Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk or in the Donbas, had been systematically changed over to new cities to the east in the northern Urals, Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk, and even farther off in Siberia in the Kuznetsk Basin. Even more recently food industries as important as pastas and canning had moved in the same direction.

  Wasn’t it clear what this meant? Didn’t it throw a new light on the Nazi—Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939? Could the U.S.S.R. really be the friend of Hitler? If the Bolsheviks were sincere this was impossible, for in that case they were fighting for the freedom of man. If they were not sincere it was still impossible, for in that case they were secretly harboring the dream of world domination, and could not tolerate the domination of the Nazis for any length of time.

  The U.S.S.R. weighed heavily in the balance. We had no right to let ourselves be put to sleep by the illusions the Western powers had entertained on that score since 1917. Russia was a nation at once very old and very young. Its strength lay in the humility and guilelessness of its people, and the impatience for well-being which had piled up over centuries under despotic rule.

  The U.S.S.R. was an unknown quantity but America was no less so. “As for them,” our teacher used to say when he was talking about America, “if they are only as skillful as they are generous, we shall all be saved!”

  The portion of the future which lay on the other side of the Atlantic was greater than Europe liked to admit. There was a vast continent there, filled with resources, teeming with people, growing in almost geometrical progression. America represented the greatest triumph of the spirit of adventure that man had ever managed to achieve. Excitement and egotism were part of it, as they are with all young nations, but America also had one of the most solid reserves of tolerance and confidence to be found anywhere in the world.

  Americans loved to invent, to build, in other words they loved action, and if they could only keep this taste intact for a long enough time, they would become Europe’s first hope, perhaps her only hope, ghastly as it might be to admit it.

  We had a course of lectures on the 1929 crash, the depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term and his second. We were told about the New Deal, the rapid recovery of America from depression, the TVA, the plans for reforestation and the development of electric power in the Rockies. For the first time in our lives, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, even Minneapolis and Duluth, Toledo, Rochester, the Mississippi and the Missouri, the Appalachians and Lake Huron became something more than just names — remarkable places where every year millions of people thought of hundreds of new ways to harness life.

  I listened and I understood. The frontiers of France, my frontiers, were breaking apart on all sides. The wand of a schoolteacher, or better his charm and his ability, were turning a sixteen-year-old French schoolboy into a citizen of the West.

  In March 1941, I was called to the blackboard, or rather to the rostrum, as my history teacher put me to the test. Within a month I had had to read some twenty books, some about Russia and others about the United States. Now I had to summarize them for my classmates and make the synthesis, as we rather pompously called it. Since it was really the first time I had had to talk in public, I was overwhelmed by fears and weighted down by notes. The anguish stayed with me, but the notes disappeared.

  I had sat down in the teacher’s seat to begin my statement. My hands moved back and forth over the top of the desk but in vain. The notes were no longer there, and I felt dizzy. Then I heard the familiar rubbing of hands and the small affectionate laugh. “I am the one who took your notes,” the teacher said. “When someone takes off on a trip, he puts his luggage in the baggage car.”

  In the emergency I felt even dizzier. Then something cleared in my head. I remembered the inner screen and discovered that I could read my notes on it with ease. They were even more legible than on paper. How could I have gone on for several months forgetting the existence of this marvelous tool? What a fool I had made of myself!

  Besides, all the time I was talking my voice was growing more assured. It sounded almost natural. As for the silence of my
classmates, it was a good sign meaning they wished me no harm, and that some would even have liked to help me out. I was sure of it for I felt them leaning toward me, François and Jean in particular.

  At the end of an hour — they told me it lasted an hour though I couldn’t believe my ears — I heard myself drawing to a close and the teacher applauding. He never applauded, especially not his own students. What could I possibly have said?

  I found out only a few seconds later from the others. It seemed I had said something astonishing, specifically that the war had only just begun, that we should only know where it was leading us after the USSR and the USA were in it, and that this double intervention would certainly not be long in coming. Dear God! How could I have said such things? I had not prepared them, what is more I didn’t even know them — literally had no idea of them! But I had to reconcile myself to the fact that my mind was outrunning my knowledge. In itself this modest discovery gave me something to dream about, and I did dream.

  [ 10 ]

  THE PLUNGE INTO COURAGE

  WEISSBERG WAS THE NAME of the thin little man with the short beard and white hair. He was always polite and always welcoming. As an old schoolmate of Jean’s father, he had a deep affection for Jean, and asked nothing more of him than a brief visit once a month. Being a bachelor he said he loved Jean like the son he had never had himself. His life had been devoted to patient research in biology. He had made some real discoveries in pharmacology, but was too modest and too absentminded to make capital of his own inventions. He had always been poor.