An Officer and a Spy

stranger, at such a moment and with nothing to gain by it, after denying everything for three months?’
    ‘I can’t help you there.’ The colonel looks over his shoulder in the direction of his lunch.
    ‘And if he’d just confessed to Captain Lebrun-Renault, why did he then go out and repeatedly shout his innocence into a hostile crowd of tens of thousands?’
    The colonel squares his shoulders. ‘Are you calling one of my officers a liar?’
    ‘Thank you, Colonel.’ I put away my notebook.
    When I get back to the ministry, I go straight to Gonse’s office. He is labouring over a stack of files. He swings his boots up on to the desk and tilts back in his chair as he listens to my report. He says, ‘So you don’t think there’s anything in it?’
    ‘No, I do not. Not now I’ve heard the details. It’s much more likely this dim captain of the Guard got the wrong end of the stick. Either that or he embellished a tale to make himself look important to his comrades. Of course I am assuming,’ I add, ‘that Dreyfus wasn’t a double agent planted on the Germans.’
    Gonse laughs and lights another cigarette. ‘If only!’
    ‘What would you like me to do, General?’
    ‘I don’t see there’s anything much you can do.’
    I hesitate. ‘There is one way of getting a definite answer, of course.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘We could ask Dreyfus.’
    Gonse shakes his head. ‘Absolutely not. He’s now beyond communication. Besides, he’ll soon be shipped out of Paris.’ He lifts his feet from the desk and sets them on the floor. He pulls the stack of files towards him. Cigarette ash spills down the front of his tunic. ‘Just leave it with me. I’ll go and explain everything to the Chief of Staff and the minister.’ He opens a dossier and starts to scan it. He doesn’t look up. ‘Thank you, Major Picquart. You are dismissed.’

2
    THAT EVENING, IN civilian clothes, I travel out to Versailles to see my mother. The draughty train sways through Paris suburbs weirdly etched by snow and gaslight. The journey takes the best part of an hour; I have the carriage to myself. I try to read a novel, The Adolescent by Dostoyevsky, but every time we cross a set of points the lights cut out and I lose my place. In the blue glow of the emergency illumination I stare out of the window and imagine Dreyfus in his cell in La Santé prison. Convicts are transported by rail in converted cattle trucks. I presume he will be sent west, to an Atlantic port, to await deportation. In this weather the journey will be a bitter hell. I close my eyes and try to doze.
    My mother has a small apartment in a modern street near the Versailles railway station. She is seventy-seven and lives alone, a widow for almost thirty years. I take it in turns with my sister to spend time with her. Anna is older than I, and has children, which I do not: my watch always falls on a Saturday night, the only time I can be sure of getting away from the ministry.
    It is well past dark by the time I arrive; the temperature must be minus ten. My mother shouts from behind the locked door: ‘Who’s there?’
    ‘It’s Georges, Maman.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Georges. Your son.’
    It takes me a minute to persuade her to let me in. Sometimes she mistakes me for my older brother, Paul, who died five years ago; sometimes – and this is oddly worse – for my father, who died when I was eleven. (Another sister died before I was born, a brother when he was eleven days old; there is one thing to be said for senility – since her mind has gone, she does not lack for company.)
    The bread and milk are frozen solid; the pipes are canisters of ice. I spend the first half-hour lighting fires to try to thaw the place out, the second on my back fixing a leak. We eat boeuf bourguignon, which the maid who comes in once a day has bought at the local traiteur . Maman rallies; she even seems to remember who I am. I tell her what I’ve been doing but I don’t mention Dreyfus or the degradation: she would struggle to understand what I am talking about. Later we sit at the piano, which occupies most of her tiny sitting room, and play a duet, the Chopin rondo. Her playing is faultless; the musical part of her brain remains quite intact; it will be the last thing to go. After she has put herself to bed, I sit on the stool and examine the photographs on top of the piano: the solemn family groups in Strasbourg, the garden of the house in Geudertheim, a miniature of my mother as a