The Affront of Doubt 2: Certainty Uncoiled

"Do not expect good from another's death." — Cato of Utica

What follows is Part Two of “The Affront of Doubt”, which came out last Sunday and ends with: “Bérégovoy walked off into the trees. He waited for the car to disappear. Then he aimed the gun at the ground and pulled the trigger.”

So, yes, gun and trigger. If you’d rather something

more fun 
with no gun 
try this one 

from exactly a year ago: “Les Six angles de la semaine” Or this from this summer, which has a very stinky sausage in it and a funny Stanley Tucci story: “Rectum…?! Damn near killed ‘em!" Or this from a couple of days ago, “Gimme Gamay” about wine and whatnot, written for Paris Wine Walks.

Now back to our feature presentation.

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The sound of the shot. The force of the recoil. This is happening, this has happened, and yet — and this he found preposterous — he was still in control. His hand, his eyes, his choices. Similar thoughts had come to him in the park, triggered by the man the park was named after, Roger Salengro, the hero spat at and slandered by the fascists and the communists, the courageous Socialist who, accused of having been a deserter by the antisemites and the royalists, went back to his apartment in Lille, put his cat in his bedroom, wrote three letters, sealed the door to the kitchen, and turned on the gas.

The same kitchen where the year before he found his wife slumped over in a chair dead from the tumors that would soon kill his mother, both dead, all three dead, because of the same relentless lies.

In one of the three letters on the table, his epitaph: “If they did not succeed in disgracing me, at least they will bear the responsibility for my death.”

Bérégovoy’s death, on the other hand, what will they say? Béré’s cowardice they will say, his ears still ringing from the shot, eardrums punctured probably, the baffling torn, just like the intercom haut parleur in his Paris apartment, the cocoon and the thorn and the lance bought with Pelat money, billionaire’s dirt, interest-free, repaid in full, half risibly in objets and books — who has such riches? Not a man who never bought stocks, look at his suits they used to say, look at his shoes, his socks, his hat! — half in cash, a cheque, all honest, transparent, impeccable. The courts exonerated him. The French will judge him. He was beloved. He gave his life.

“If you think it’s too loud you’re too old.” He had seen this on a girl’s t-shirt in the park.

Springtime. He couldn’t hear the wings of the birds because he was deafened by the shot, but their movement caught his eye, and he watched them take flight. Were there eggs in the nests? Had the eggs in the nests already hatched? He had never felt the slightest connection with animals. This was the week farmers slice off the tails of lambs to prevent maggots from infesting their culs.

He hated farms. He was a machine man, a mechanic, a metal worker, a railwayman.

No one was coming, it was raining harder, and it would be dark soon. No one would react, he was alone, there was still time, it could move now in different directions. The chauffeur and the bodyguard would be back in five minutes. His hand, his eyes, his choices. Financial favors. Insiders. Outside in the rain. The car coming. Evening classes. Sweeping the floor. The car coming. Calumny. Gifts. His wife. His daughter.

Il est toujours joli, le temps passé
Une fois qu'ils ont cassé leur pipe
On pardonne à tous ceux qui nous ont offensés
Les morts sont tous des braves types

Brassens. From where? Biting on a clay pipe to stop the scream. If the soldier dies under the surgeon’s saw the pipe falls and breaks. We forgive all those who have offended us. The dead are all brave fellows.

Sitting on the ground. Wet. Sitting on the edge of a ditch in a grove behind a wet thicket of high grass. Raising the gun to his temple, mechanically, as if in a film or a dream, a gesture tied to nothing, part of nothing, performed by someone else, unimportant, a detail in the corner of the frame. He smells irises and wild blackcurrant. He looks for them, desperate for their colors, but his glasses are fogged, and his head pounds from the wine, from the shot, from the thoughts, the disgrace. The crumbling stone wall behind him, covered with moss. He looks at the trees, focusses on the rain on his face, on his glasses, on his lips. The taste of rainwater. When was the last time he had tasted rainwater? Where did the sun go? How did this happen?

His death would not be instantaneous, he knew this. Nor, by all reliable reports, would it be painless, far from it, though the explosive force of the bullet would immediately liquefy the front part of his brain. His body, face down, writhing and churning in the wet grass. When the chauffeur and bodyguard returned five minutes later, just as he predicted, they would find him still face down, moaning softly and muttering unintelligibly about Salengro, whose hand his father had shaken. Or had he shaken it? He remembers being on his bicycle and seeing him, an important man. A Socialist man. “A trade unionist does not kill himself on May 1st by chance,” they will say.

A passerby under a black umbrella, a woman in her 40s out for a walk with a younger woman, perhaps her daughter, will give him CPR. The bodyguard will try to stop her. “Someone is coming, madame,” he will say. “I am going to give him first aid,” she will reply, pushing past him.

She will turn Bérégovoy over to reveal his face. His eyeglasses still on his nose, though skewed. His eyes open. No exit wound.

Two soldiers nearby, dressed in civilian clothing, watch the road. There is a woman with them, an elderly woman with a dog.

The ambulance came. Three sedans and a van.

Soon it would be dark.

“If I disappear,” Bérégovoy told a colleague a few days before, “it would fix it for everyone. A strong new beginning, a founding act that would wash everything away.” And then, here, on this May Day, International Workers' Day, watching the boys pedaling their bicycles, some with whom he had played babyfoot in the Maison des Jeunes the weekend before, his thoughts turned to his own youth, and to his own bicycle, and to the time he saw in a car the man that the park was named after, Roger Salengro, the Minister of the Interior in the short-lived Front Populaire government of Léon Blum. Bérégovoy was 11 years old, just awakening to politics, just awakening to deeds of violence, to denigration and slander, for this was 1936, the year the royalists attacked Léon Blum in Paris in broad daylight, pulled him out of the car he was in by the hair — a 67-year-old man, the same age as he now was but frailer, a man of quiet habits in very poor health — and tried to lynch him, shouting “Au poteau, au poteau, Blum!” and “Death to the Jew” and “We’re going to hang you!” Kicking him to the ground, kicking him in the head, repeatedly, rupturing his temporal artery, leaving him on the ground for dead, covered in blood.

During the struggle his hat, a very special broad-brimmed black hat, a gift from the Party, fell to the pavement and was snatched up by the royalists and taken to their headquarters, where it was put on display in their trophy room.

This was the year before Bérégovoy took his first factory job in Déville-lès-Rouen, a commune on the banks of the Cailly, near Rouen, in Normandy.

And then, May Day, 1993, in the late afternoon, Pierre Bérégovoy, who like Roger Salengro had given all his life and all his joy to his party, sitting then in the wet grass among the trembling poplars, looking up at the leaves twinkling silver in the rain, desperate to hear their quivering shimmer, to hear the ducks and the geese on the canal, the wood pigeons bubbling contentedly on the banks, the tennis game, the tractor spreading muck in a nearby field.

The type of place, he thought, remembering the Chekhov of his childhood, that made you want to sit down and write a ballad.

A flyboat passes. Dutch voices. Off in the distance, the steady tide of weekending cars on the autoroute he built. What else was he thinking about? He was thinking about what his father had told him, how in Ukraine — his father’s homeland — the poplar is a beautiful woman, a lonely woman, a woman in love. The thought was interrupted by the roar of a TGV, the first thing he hears and feels, the ground trembling, the world’s fastest train, the record set the week before, 511km/h on the new Atlantic line. He had been there, at the Gare de Vendôme, he had caressed the still-warm engine, and then he had gone to confession, for the first time as an adult, for the first time since Confirmation, in the abbey of the Trinity, which holds a teardrop shed by Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus.

“I hold information that will destroy lives,” he told the priest, “but will purify the nation.”

The TGV shot past. He pulled the trigger, the shot rang out, the birds flew away. Other performances are to be expected, he thought. I am in favor of this, he said to himself, on one condition: that safety does not suffer. This made him think of the Channel Tunnel, a year from completion. He had watched the last tunnel boring machine move into place, a giant burrowing beetle, a mechanical mole. All the machines on the French side were named after women: Brigitte, Europa, Catherine, Virginie, Pascaline, and the last one, Séverine, the one he watched disappear into the dark shaft, swallowed whole by the hole. Ten men were dead so far. TGV East will go as far as Berlin — this was Chancellor Kohl's wish — and as far as Warsaw and probably as far as Moscow. This would be possible within a generation. Take in everything, he said to himself. The rain on my face, on my glasses, on the gun, beading on the dark oiled steel. The grass under my feet. The fish jumping. The tractor. The bridge. The muguet sprig in my lapel. Another branch of this TGV Est, envisaged and studied by the French and Germans side by side, Europe’s bitterest enemies, will go from Strasbourg to Munich and reach Ukraine. This is undoubtedly the future, he said to himself.

But by then he had pulled the trigger and shot himself in the head. The reassembled birds had flown away a second time.

There was no third shot, no magic bullet, no military commandos, no frogmen in the canal.

He would die several hours later in a helicopter parked on the tarmac of the Nevers Hospital, now called the Hospital Pierre-Bérégovoy, just in time for the evening news.

Three days later, standing next to the flag-draped coffin in the main square of Nevers, the President of the Republic, in the presence of the bereaved family and the top ranks of the French political elite, declared:

“He preferred to die rather than endure the affront of doubt. All the explanations in the world will not justify throwing the honor of a man — and, ultimately, his life — to the dogs for the price of his accusers’ double failure to respect the fundamental laws of our Republic, which protect both the dignity and the freedom of each of us. Will the emotion, the sadness, the pain that has been running deep in the popular conscience since the announcement of what happened late Saturday near Nevers, his city, our city, on the banks of a canal where he had often come to enjoy the peace and beauty of things, be the signal from which new ways of confronting each other while respecting each other will give another meaning to political life? I hope so, I ask so, and I make the French people aware of the serious warning that the deliberate death of Pierre Bérégovoy carries with it. I think of these last words of the great writer and scientist Jacques Monod, that everyone repeats in himself until the end: ‘I seek to understand.’”

I seek to understand. People know everything without having known anything. The affront of doubt. What had been discussed at the Bérégovoy family lunch that afternoon? And who would throw him to the dogs? Hadn’t they all?

His father, Adrïan Bérégovoï, long dead by then, an illegal immigrant, just as I was at the time. He was from the city of Izium in eastern Ukraine, a Tsarist officer, a Cossack, a Menshevik, a White Russian, then a man on the run, desperate to make it to America, to the great city of Chicago or a small town in the prairies — he had read Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis — where he dreamt of being a taxi driver, but he missed the boat, never got beyond Déville-lès-Rouen.

Bérégovoy’s mother was a barmaid in her parent’s café when she met Adrïan Bérégovoï, who was lodging in a room upstairs. Every morning she served him a café au petit sous — coffee with a shot of Calvados. He ate his lunch on a stool at the bar, and usually had a glass or two of wine there after his shift, and ate his dinner there, and stayed behind after, chatting to the barkeep and his wife but especially the daughters, one of whom, Irène, Bérégovoy’s mother-to-be, he married the following year.

When he applied for naturalization, the mayor of Déville-lès-Rouen, with whom he often rough shot partridge and snipe, wrote, “Bérégovoy is an excellent boy of irreproachable conduct, of exemplary sobriety, of excellent character. He is a good patriot and a sincere and fervent republican.”

Adrïan became a French citizen in 1930. He worked as a metalworker, a café-épicerie owner, a pig breeder until foot-and-mouth disease wiped out his and every other drove in the region, a café owner again somewhere else, a cider maker, and a manual laborer in an industrial weaving factory in Elbeuf. In 1940, the factory was bombed by the Nazis. In the weeks that followed, Adrïan destroyed his lungs clearing the rubble.

Pierre, 16, had to quit school and take another factory job, first as a floor sweeper, then as a messenger boy, then on the assembly line. He hated the work, hated the repetitive tasks, and was grateful when anti-Jewish laws shut the enterprise.

Three months later, he joined the SNCF, France's national state-owned railway company. By this time, Léon Blum was in Buchenwald and weighed 42 kilos. Six months later, Béré joined the Resistance. Two years later, 80 years ago, the SNCF transported 76,000 French and foreign Jews to extermination camps.

Gestures, even these, are actions, events, things that express things, ideas, meanings, feelings, and intentions, as solid and stable as any object in the universe. Bérégovoy’s geste was deliberate and deliberated, and honorable, it had nothing to do with the television guignols or the cruel caricatures in Canard Enchaîné, though it was undeniably triggered by intense and insurmountable feelings of dishonor and shame, in turn triggered by campaign slush funds, questionable overdrafts, loans, gifts, and graft. But it was nevertheless an act of honor. This is what they will say. By an honorable man. An honest man, a man of honor, a man who, a year before, as the newly appointed Prime Minister of the Republic, stood before the National Assembly waving a sheet of paper and declared:

“I intend to empty the abscess of corruption. If there are cases that are still pending, believe me, they will not be pending anymore. Do you think that I would take responsibility for such remarks before the national representative assembly, which I respect, and before public opinion, if I did not intend to honor all the commitments I make before you? So I ask you, eye to eye, to hear me. As I am a new Prime Minister and a cautious politician, I have here a list of personalities that I could eventually talk to you about. But I won’t.”

A gesture of anguish and a decisive deed, an authentic act of conscience, a pledge of allegiance to a code of moral conduct, to truth and justice, to civic duty. Just as Lucretia’s was when, cruelly raped by the tyrant, she demanded a promise of vengeance from her husband and father — “it is only the body that has been violated,” she told them, “the soul is pure, death shall bear witness to that, but pledge me your solemn word that this violation shall not go unpunished” and then she drew a dagger concealed in her dress and stabbed herself through the heart.

Just as Cato of Utica’s was when he ripped open the self-inflicted wound in his belly with his bare hands, pulled out his entrails and threw them to the floor.

Extreme gestures by individuals who, abandoning their lives, chose how and when their stories would end, sacrificing their bodies for their souls, their flesh and blood for ideas and ideals, their being for the meaning of being.

Their hands, their eyes, their choices. The affront of the doubt. Was it as empty as that? Is that what was going through the brain as it liquified? He was smart enough, he could tell a story and follow one if it stayed in its lane, close to the center line, curving and swerving at the corners. Or was it the autoroute, and the bridge, which now bears his name? The sports hall behind the Ducal Palace. The swimming pool. The hospital. The tennis courts. The drinking water plant. The apartment on Belles-Feuilles. The piece of paper with the names on it, waving in his hand.

His eyes. His choices.

The birds, returning to their nests. Soon it would be dark.

What did he believe? Is there more to the man than the man? To any man? I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue, said Cato’s father, who lived out his days, and died an imbecile, than why I have one. His own father told him that. And Mitterrand wore a hat just like Léon Blum’s. That was the thought. That was what he was thinking as he lay there face down in the grass. That and Séverine, cutting through the chalk marl. That and how, soon, it would be dark enough to see the stars.