The Incident at Antioch Page 17

  In moments of weariness and confusion, as I looked over these arrows, these strikes,

  In which the bygone days of power were condensed like a children’s book,

  I would slip into a nostalgic reverie.

  I’m giving you this, Paula,

  So that you might have the epitome of absurdity with you

  And so be equipped with a device for measuring

  What’s meaningful and enduring in action.

  If you’re able to place this scroll at the tip of a flame,

  A blood-red flower contained within the seventeen sides of a regular polygon

  Will appear to you and blossom mysteriously between your fingers. (He gives her the map.) Now it’s my turn to tell you to leave. I know you’ve been won over.

  (PAULA hugs her brother tightly for a long time then moves away.)

  PAULA: I’m so cold! The wind’s coming up! What a gray sky!

  (EXIT PAULA. Some time goes by during which VILLEMBRAY puts his things in a crate. Then he tosses pebbles into the water. ENTER CEPHAS, MOKHTAR, and RENÉ, in military fatigues and carrying guns.)

  RENÉ: Villembray! You’ve been sentenced to death.

  VILLEMBRAY (gets down on all fours): Go ahead and kill me like a dog, gentlemen.

  CEPHAS: What does it matter!

  (They kill VILLEMBRAY.)

  ACT III

  The Council of Nicea1

  SCENE 1: In the place of foundations.

  In the ruins at dusk, MOKHTAR, CAMILLE, and RENÉ, in military fatigues, are standing guard around the fires. All the characters are a good fifteen years older. DAVID is much younger than everyone else. He is standing a little apart.

  MOKHTAR: Another night when the sky, by absorption into the mirror of the frozen ground, is suspended over our campfires

  Like an ice floe of stars.

  CAMILLE: What lousy weather for standing guard over rubble! And not a soul around. Who’d risk ignoring the Reds’ order to keep away from the ruins of the city?

  They’ve all gone back to the sticks where they came from.

  If anyone comes snooping around here, put ’em up against the wall and shoot ’em!

  That’d give us something to do.

  RENÉ: Such was the end. Cephas, the supreme leader, who has a hold on our hearts because of his stubborn determination, led us through the maze of events for fifteen years. And now, like a dam giving way at snow level, it has all collapsed. The State, reduced to the status of a grubby little village in the boondocks, is buried beneath the mud and rubble.

  DAVID (from a distance): People wander the roads, or have been evenly spread out among the provinces. Everyone’s chief concern is finding enough to eat.

  RENÉ: Fifteen years of informed hatred! The land is taking its revenge on the cities. Producing food to eat everyone’s responsibility again. Money burned by the pile in secret rituals.

  I observe the chaos with a clear eye.

  I see rural society, like the purple granite of islands in a jet-black sea,

  Surviving, to the exclusion of all else, under the watchful eye of armed soldiers.

  In the valleys, amid the tractor hulks, the Gascon ox in the yoke is plodding once again.

  MOKHTAR: The factories are starting up again from scratch. Four pros in a shed with a busted roof try to patch up a milling machine. Electricity sputters out of a generator with the sound of a bumblebee. Nobody has a clue what ought to be manufactured, but what does it matter! Worker expertise is as bare as a hand on a screwdriver.

  CAMILLE: Children of all ages from all over are gathered in a circle around a storyteller. They’re taught the legend of the old world and are promised the glory of what’s born in blood and strife. Afterwards comes the steaming lunch truck, where cornmeal, in individual portions, is cooking. Family ties are but a ghost of their former selves. Children are creating a traveling village of their own.

  MOKHTAR: Humanity, on the day of its final effort, is going through its collapse.

  DAVID: You said it! As determined by its name, victory is reducing ten thousand years to ashes in one fell swoop. The world is broken in two. Yet the point is to rebuild relentlessly and not leave anything to chance or to the enrichment of a few. In the law reconstituted on the ruins, everyone counts the same, and therefore very little.

  RENÉ: Equality before life constantly equivalent to equality before death. The justice of the law put on a par with the justice of the individual.

  MOKHTAR: An old man’s eye sees things confusedly, as though from a distance. To me it looks as though everything’s been scraped together helter-skelter, as with a rake: leaves, flowers, drains, and stones. But too many deaths and too much apathy undermine the idea, in the long run. Our leader Cephas knows this. The morning after a night like this is meant for planting,

  In the ground spread with manure,

  Something fragile like a willow, to which we can deftly hitch our scrawny horses.

  For it can’t be that the only way ever for people to govern themselves is to kill anything that resists.

  CAMILLE: The world is as black as an oven in which some foul bread is baking. So beating up on crooks and hustlers is our only source of satisfaction. Did we lay waste the earth just to see another bunch of suits strutting around again? The weeds have got to be pulled up for good. The dead are invisible compared with what’s going on here. A general who sits there with his head in his hands counting the wounded in the heat of battle is totally screwed. A world changed from top to bottom or nothing at all. Cephas said it, right from the incident at Antioch: this time, the dice have been rolled. We’re betting the Whole Pot and nothing less.

  RENÉ: In the distance, smoke is rising from the volcanoes in the limpid salt air.

  DAVID (in the tone of an order): Recite the prayer with me.

  Hail, the blood-stained blank page on which it’s up to us to write the poem of the century!2

  Hail, freezing night and terrifying fire, heroic despair, scattering and regrouping!

  CAMILLE: Hail, chaos and night! Hail, death, through which life is transmitted! Hail, the security our weapons provide and the smoking rubble where the laws lie dying!

  MOKHTAR: But it’s not true that there’s nothing, since there’s supremely

  Us! And yet it may be too hard for us

  To be the sole sign of the true standing above the fear of the masses.

  Because that truth is only in the place of its force, and there’s no guarantee that from that force it can create a social bond.

  Clear water is flowing at the bottom of the bombed-out sewers. A slimy bloom of algae is covering the water in the fountains of the abandoned government buildings.

  Meanwhile, peace of mind and the work of thought are deteriorating in our people, with too many gun-proud young men in their midst.

  Youth is the force of destruction. But is it any good under the tyranny of the long haul?

  I wonder about this, dear comrades, like an old man whose confidence is legendary.

  Night! You keep chaos in abeyance simply by freezing the dark. Teach us the other side of victory, the form of the One, the unfamiliar dawn, the end of war through war.3

  SCENE 2: In the place of foundations.

  In the middle of the night. CAMILLE and DAVID are on watch. MOKHTAR and RENÉ, wrapped in blankets, are asleep. ENTER CEPHAS.

  DAVID: Here he is. Be careful not to stare at him. He doesn’t like to be looked at.

  CAMILLE: You know him so well, David.

  CEPHAS: Greetings.

  CAMILLE: Hi, Cephas.

  (Silence.)

  CEPHAS: All right then. What’s new? (CEPHAS stares into the distance as if he could see in the dark. Then he laughs to himself. Suddenly wheeling around to face them:) Why are you staring at me like that?

  CAMILLE: We’re not staring at you.

  DAVID: You’re the one who’s staring! Like a screech owl hunting a rat, you fix your white-winged gaze upon the invisible thing in the nettles.r />
  CEPHAS: I’m content, see, with a contentment that’s like an extensionless point in my soul.

  Youth is over; let’s thank history for that. I was a man of the past, and thinking was obsolete.

  In this despicable, deteriorating place, I argued, without much to go on, that the road to greatness went through the treasure of the ruins.

  I set the inner fire free.

  I was able to avert the threat. I had a suspicious calmness about me, if you must know. A taste for dark pleasures . . .

  But thinking, by itself, is relentless. You just have to trust in it.

  Yes, I can see in the dark! I can see that there’s nothing there. And because of that, my heart leaps up like a hand raised in blessing.

  These times are utterly worthless.

  DAVID: All sorts of decisions lie ahead.

  CEPHAS: How exquisite the cold is!

  DAVID: Give us your plan for reconstruction. The discussion’s wide open; people’s suffering, enormous.

  CEPHAS: Let me alone, young man. I can see in the dark, and my eyes penetrate so far without encountering any obstacle

  That my joy isn’t adequate to fill the void that’s causing it.

  Man has destroyed his own place. He’s back to wandering, and suddenly realizes, in utter amazement, that the bonds that constituted his conception of life are all broken.

  DAVID: Yet if destruction undoes the bonds, then what constitutes politics is, in one regard alone, that destruction’s unbearable intensity. We’re responsible for the law.

  (Silence.)

  CEPHAS: When I was wounded. We were walking due north, along the sea. At night, I was sitting on my stretcher, and the sentries looked like blocks of lead to me. I could tell that the sand was crackling in the moonlight, and the foam, mixed with ice, was glittering. The retreat was building up its uncertainty in us.

  I was tormented by too many details, like a war commander, who has as hard a time gathering his thoughts as a man on the verge of drowning.

  A voice was heard from the sea, as if spirited away by the cold. Glacial, terse, biting. Paula’s voice? Was it really she? Or was it the oceanic rumbling of a funeral? It was only my name, like a pebble washed out to sea on the tide of that voice. Paula, or the ocean, said: “Cephas!” a first time.

  And I wanted to climb up on a rusted tank to drive the men before me,

  To eviscerate the anthill of the frost!

  I was pinned down on the metal of the sand, shivering like a flayed seal.

  Again: “Cephas!” Then for a third time:

  “Cephas!” Like a word formed by an underwater woman.

  What have you to say to me now, when analysis in its silence starkly illuminates

  The end of the dream?

  What do you think, David?

  DAVID: I’m getting impatient. What’s the meaning—you, the anonymous one—of boring us stiff with some anxiety or other of yours?

  CEPHAS: The end. I’ll go lie down in the ashes of States. I’ll take the old laws away with me.

  Goodbye, I’m leaving, I’m throwing in the towel.

  CAMILLE: What?! Cephas! You can’t leave things in the lurch! You can’t cut off the head of our undertaking right in the midst of disaster and destitution!

  DAVID: With no explanation! With no critique! Turning your back when the rubble has to be cleared away!

  CEPHAS: We’ve achieved what I joined you for in the command jurisdiction. We’ve given a jump start to the decline of this country, reduced by us to its terrifying embryonic origins.

  Beyond victory there’s only defeat. No, no—not the sudden reversal kind of defeat! The slow, irreversible kind, the defeat of those who have to come to terms with the way things are.

  Not the useless, glory-filled defeat, not the debacle that’s the stuff of legend! But the useful, fruitful defeat, the defeat that brings back labor peace and restores the State’s power.

  I’ll leave the grandeur of that kind of defeat to you, not out of pride or indifference to its progress, but because I’m simply not cut out for it.

  Owing to my way of thinking about the chaos, I’m getting in the way now of the obligation to rebuild.

  DAVID: Now where are you looking?

  CEPHAS: David! Son of Paula! You’re insisting on the decisions called for by the chaos. You unwittingly want the abstract terror of a government to bring the vital terror of the revolution to an end.

  You’re right.

  I’m of no more use in a situation like this than Villembray was for saving the old men back at the beginning of our venture. Villembray, whom we murdered, because that was how the bell of inevitability was tolling.

  Like him, I’ll retreat to a bare spot on the carcass of time. And just as you did with him, you may have to kill me. That’s what I’d do, if I were you. It would be the bell announcing the return to the cities.

  Yet let the lie be held up to the light! Of all we’ve trampled underfoot,

  May the remains embedded in the restoration preserve their hold over you, and may the stench

  Endure!

  CAMILLE: Cephas, don’t leave.

  DAVID: Stay. Be our uneasiness, if power offends you.

  CEPHAS: In the beginning, I liked being a leader. Some things were not to be sneezed at:

  The flyer, brief as a lover’s telegram, rousing high school drop-outs clear across the country, or stirring up a big shop-floor commotion out in the banlieues.

  The applause for the leaders on the grandstand, amid the red flags and the portraits, in the summer heat of the crowds.

  Or the ceasefire, in the winter chill of the army vans.

  But all of that finally peaked, and the only thing left is the fear of being looked at.

  That’s why I’ll step over the chalk outline of fame and leave the circle.

  Take this, David. I’m giving it to you. (He removes the revolver attached to his belt and hands it to DAVID.) Goodbye! With no part of History do I want any further belonging.

  Like the poet who can’t be distracted by the sudden great event from the rhythm in which presence turns up, I’ll no longer abide making decisions.

  I long for immobility.

  I won’t remain in the community of night. Where my name was spoken three times

  Is where I’ll go. Dunes covered in snow!

  The waves carry the fate of the jellyfish off into the fog.

  I’ll lie low in an abandoned bunker, when the long-forgotten wars are no more, between the rusty iron rods,

  Than a puddle of fresh water where the goats come to pee.

  (CEPHAS starts to walk away.)

  DAVID: Cephas!

  CAMILLE: Are you going to leave without writing a will? Are you going to give yourself up, all alone like this?

  (EXIT CEPHAS.)

  DAVID: He’s gone.

  (CAMILLE and DAVID stand there motionless for a long time.)

  SCENE 3: In the place of foundations.

  Around 4 A.M. Sitting around a table are MOKHTAR, CAMILLE, RENÉ, and DAVID, all dressed in heavy clothing on account of the cold. The only light is provided by a few candles on the table.

  CAMILLE: Let’s announce that Cephas is dead.

  MOKHTAR: Let’s announce that the central committee, in accordance with our great leader Cephas’s will, has elected David. For the time being.

  RENÉ: Until the Party congress.

  CAMILLE: The Party congress! I wouldn’t hold my breath!

  RENÉ: The basic principle can no more be suspended than can the changing of the seasons. The necessary document’s got to be forged. Cephas’s death can only be officially confirmed through the grief of national mourning. We’ll say he scribbled the message recommending David. We’ll come up with the scrap of paper he supposedly wrote it on.

  CAMILLE (snickering): Of course. Something along the lines of: “If you’re the one in charge, I can rest easy.” But let’s make sure we take the necessary military precautions. The fourth region isn’t a don
e deal.

  DAVID: Why me, though? Mokhtar, with all his experience and sound judgment, would get everyone’s vote.

  RENÉ: The father rather than the son. That’s only normal.

  CAMILLE (sharply): It’s not yet time for an Arab to lead our people.

  DAVID: I’m half-Arab, Camille.

  MOKHTAR: Camille’s right. May I remind you that even after so much bloodshed it’s clear we haven’t changed the world as much as we might claim. A full-blooded Arab only later on! We’ve got to be cautious. A half will do for now. I couldn’t agree more.

  DAVID: We can disregard that, if need be, by using force.

  RENÉ: Use force over and over and the world will eventually give out, then break apart. Our civil war dead will recognize the old commander by his silver eye tooth.

  DAVID: Quiet! The decision was already made a long time ago. My lack of experience has prepared me to know my own worth. As a child, I was influenced by both

  The word of my mother, Paula, like a cryptic warning,

  And the integrity of my father, Mokhtar, whom I followed into war the way you follow a star from the bridge of a ship. This family background has matured me and makes me acceptable to everyone.

  Managing the disaster is not too hard to do to determine its meaning for us all.

  Between your desire for peace and your determination to destroy, I’ll be

  The focal point for you and someone to turn to as a resource.

  But first of all, because a doubt’s been nagging at me: with what official decree, once Cephas has been declared dead, should we begin

  Containing the turmoil?

  RENÉ: That would be national reconstruction.