Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge Page A

could only reconstruct the nightmare in incoherent snatches. Her hand shook as it reached for the tumbler of water. She nudged at a fold of batiste with her finger, and found herself intent upon the small Browning. Two squeezes of the trigger, and both of us would be delivered … Her hand shook worse because she was more frightened of this temptation than of all the darkness in the world. Through the fabric, so as not to feel its magnetic touch, she picked up the gun and leaned out of the bed to propel it onto the floor, under the other bed, Sacha’s. This move did her good, but now she could see herself in the mirror, a whitish specter looming indistinctly in the ever cold and twilit region where the dead await their turn to be reborn — or not, since resurrection is just another dead superstition … “Resurrection is dead, it’s a scientific fact.” Without thinking, she switched on the bedside light. Sacha was asleep on his back, broad forehead, thin mouth, protuberant blue-tinged lids, scarily unlike himself. Detached from the universe. Dead. Nadine weighed that certainty. The icy chill from beyond the grave became an all-encompassing peace. I am dead as well. It’s good. It’s simple.
    And Sacha opened his eyes as he did every day of his life, those preoccupied eyes, wise, real, and infuriating.
    “What’s the matter, Nadine?”
    “Oh, nothing, I thought I heard …”
    “It’s a motorcycle. What a lout, making a racket at this hour! Lie down. Go back to sleep.”
    He exasperated her. The exasperation melted into tenderness.
    “I love you,” she said in a childish voice. “I love life, I love death, it’s strange …”
    His voice echoed hers: “Strange.”
    * * *
    Monsieur Gobfin, assumed by unobservant clients to be the hotel desk clerk, actually performed much more important tasks. The trust of a proprietor ill with a kidney problem invested him with quasi-managerial status; and if he spent the busiest hours of both day and night behind the little reception counter, distributing the mail, hooking and unhooking the room keys, it was mostly due to his love of the job. An eye on everything! Seven minutes’ walk from place d’Anvers, six minutes from the confluence of the rue de Clignancourt and the boulevard de Rochechouart, this hotel was like Lutetia itself, a kind of vessel anchored in the middle of treacherously troubled waters. Fail to count the linen returned by the laundry two days in a row, and you will soon count the cost of your oversight. Neglect to appear in the kitchen two hours before the first sitting for luncheon — and talk about pilferage, my rascals! A reasonable level of theft, let’s say around ten percent is par for the course because in this world, or at least here in Paris, everybody’s got to eat; but the house has to make a profit too, eh? And Monsieur Gobfin would never stand for “being taken for a fool, what with the price of Normandy butter.” “I’m nobody’s sucker,” he’d say, and people took his word for it.
    Monsieur Gobfin’s long sparse hair, glued in black strips with brilliantine over his yellowed scalp, along with his hollow cheeks, conveyed such a knowing, indulgent sagacity that his eyes hardly ever strayed below the relatively higher zones. The brown, skittish gaze that never rested, shying away as soon as it encountered another’s, shot out simultaneously in several directions, scrutinizing the clients from bottom, sides, and angles, homing in on the glints of soul that show through in the back of a man’s hand, the cut of a coat, the timbre of a cough, the manner in which a pen is gripped or a bill examined. A glint of soul, needless to say, is an excessively literary flourish in this context, foreign to Monsieur Gobfin’s vocabulary. He would rather have said, “how shall I put it, something like an odor, at times even a bit of a stench.” His perusal was apt to begin at the level of the gut, for the belly is infinitely expressive: a