Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  They haven’t yet invented those marvellous operations for smashed jaws which will make the names of military surgeons famous, first remove a cutaneous flap two skin layers thick, from the top of the head, then bring it down and manoeuvre it over the lower part of the face, the quality of the skin taken from the scalp is far superior to that from the arm, which was previously used, the flap will be positioned over the damaged area, the patient can allow the hair of the flap to grow thus reconstituting an almost normal beard which will hide any scarring, though the effect is debatable from an aesthetic point of view. It’s better than nothing, the patient will say. In the clearing, the dragoons charge the machine guns which destroy their momentum.

  Basically when I was with Hans, I was jealous. In the end I admitted as much to myself. At first I thought of it as a branch of gymnastics. Before Marie-Thérèse, when I woke up I’d feel washed-out but now the moment I stirred I could see her and felt alive, there she was before my very eyes, she’d be smiling at Hans, I knew she wanted to take him away from me, I’d hold out a cup of tea to her, I wanted to tip it all over her frock, pink Liberty print again, why didn’t she go, go away and wash and dry herself and change, and come back looking a fright, tipping the tea over her is so petty, if you really want rid of her throw it in her face, don’t worry whether it’s boiling hot or not, you’re dreaming you’re throwing tea in Marie-Thérèse’s face because you know you’ll never do it, whereas you could tip tea over the starchily creaking fabric at any time, and you tell yourself it’s petty, result: you do nothing.

  Marie-Thérèse puts her hand on Hans’s forearm, like an old army friend. You could also take her to one side and threaten to kick her down the stairs if she touches him once more, you must smile at her, people are looking, they know everything and are enjoying it, dig your nails into her face, this new fashion is unspeakable, forehead uncovered on one side and on the other hair hanging down over the eyebrow, a sultry look for fast women, nails in the cheek, apparently if you use an ordinary lump of sugar to break the skin the scars never disappear.

  What right did she have laughing like that? I knew she wanted to take him from me but I couldn’t do anything until she’d actually done it, people would have said I was hysterical; and Hans playing the innocent, my darling girl, I don’t understand why you don’t get on with her, she’d smile, she’d blush, she wanted to take him away from me.

  Tell us what happened next, Max, not what really happened next, except for the death of that teacher Robert, tell us another story, Max, it’s true, instead make it the end of the story of the company officer who fought the duel, yes, the infantryman, I get confused with all these officers, cavalry Captain Jourde at Monfaubert, who was the infantry captain of Alain-Fournier who was himself a lieutenant at Saint-Rémy, those cavalry lieutenants at Monfaubert, the infantry CO with the name six and a half centuries old, the one Max later saw riding off to attack pillboxes with Lazare, the lad who liked sweets, yes Max’s major’s sister-in-law had told him the rest of the story of the duel when he saw her in Paris on a different leave, the lover who was no such thing, he had simply dreamed of being her lover, he used to send letters as if it had all really happened.

  And very racy they were for a major’s very Catholic wife, words expressing the thing, compared with them Caillaux’s letters were elegant froth. But nothing had happened, nothing at all.

  The major’s wife had never answered any such letters and had never met the man. The sister showed Max the letters, well she did not show them exactly, she said they were in the black box on the table. She left the room, I’ll be back in a moment, I want you to tell me if the letters are genuine, my sister always told me that nothing had happened, with me she just laughed about them, I never read the letters, she left them all with me for safe-keeping, except for the last one, but I never wanted to read them, Lieutenant, to read them was a sin.

  Imagine that, my friends! the widow had never read them, that was her sister’s mortal sin: to have read them. She told me I cannot entirely rule out the idea that my sister lied to me, I feel the presence of the Devil, I myself have lied to my confessor, I told him I hadn’t found the letters, he wants me to hand them over so that he can destroy them, my sister is innocent, all she did was read them without telling her husband, she was afraid of being suspected of wrongdoing.

  Maybe too the major’s wife wasn’t all that put out to find in the man’s letters a reference to doings no one had ever taught her – ‘darling, how I loved yesterday afternoon and the way you let me take that virginity of which even married women never speak, for they are only supposed to have one’ – yes, the letters were the most awful rubbish, and he signed them ‘Honoré, who loves you’, which he had crossed out and corrected and given what he’d said, he felt justified in putting ‘your darling Honoré, who loves you madly’.

  Well, I’ll spare you the boring details, oh no, Max, details are what makes the paper they’re written on worth while, God is in the details, they’re the reporter’s first duty, I’m not sure the woman they were intended for understood them fully, they even mentioned such practices as a Cuban embrace and a crab’s claw, the man had smothered everything with a sentimental Musset-type sauce, a lot of rubbish words.

  In less than a week, the woman was dead of a nasty bout of bronchitis.

  The major had found one of these racy missives in the deceased’s writing desk and ‘darling Honoré’ had received a military sword full in the throat.

  The major had saluted the witnesses, the man had died for something that really wasn’t worth it, died for a joke, dear friends, Max would say, and many died for another joke, a joke on an altogether larger scale, on the evening of 29 July 1914, between Moscow and Berlin, it wasn’t letters that were sent but telegrams, and these last official telegrams exchanged between the two empires bring war, one signed ‘Your uncle Willy’ and the other ‘Your loving Nicky’, war: a great big joke played by old men.

  We even have photos dating from before the war in which Nicky and Willy, so fond of each other, are playing croquet, all very pally, with the façade of a château in the background, great game, croquet, very character-forming, they also go bicyle-riding, their majesties ride the first freewheel bicycles, freewheeling being designed to relieve the velocipedist’s legs, such a devastatingly droll expression, so ‘pre-war’: ‘to freewheel’.

  The brasserie on the Boulevard des Italiens is enormous, noisy, hot, friendly, it is newly decorated, in the American style, large panels of dark wood, great stretches of light-coloured wall, it is the triumph of the panel and is echoed even in women’s dresses, one panel fore, one panel aft, tall mirrors everywhere, very bright electric light, 1920s styling, no fancy curlicues, huge chandeliers but not of dangling crystals, made entirely of huge, clear prisms, and real live sparrows which nest above them and chirrup from one chandelier to another.

  At a table just behind them, a woman stares at Max, Max sees her from the front and also from the side in one of the mirrors, he can see himself in another mirror, he can pretend he’s not watching the woman, that he’s looking at something else, and he can see her while she watches him talking. At the same time he can observe his own face, which he doesn’t much care for, cauliflower ears, round head, flat profile, eyes slightly staring, a comic valet, the main thing is to keep talking, apparently when he becomes animated people don’t notice how ugly he is, from time to time the woman seems interested, at least more than she is by her own table companions.

  Fantastic face, thinks Max, high cheekbones, large eyes, not French, and not because of the cheekbones and the abundant brown hair, it’s rather the way she is, it’s the face of someone who does other things in life than try to please men, she’s beautiful but she doesn’t give a damn, her bearing is both restrained and free, is she powerful? A banker maybe? She gave a start when Max said the only ones left standing will be the arseholes, a foreigner who speaks French fluently then, get up? No, wait until she gets up, very grande dame, distin
guished, make contact, whisk her off in a taxi, in taxis all women become tarts, and this one isn’t likely to go at it in a half-hearted way, such a contemptuous way of looking at the people at her table, no not contemptuous, she wouldn’t be so obvious, but her mind’s not elsewhere either, she’s there all right but no one’s got her attention, in the back of the taxi, backside, lips, the lot, then get out and leave the taxi to her.

  At Monfaubert, the dragoons thrust and slash and fall, and have gone much too wide on the left of the target of the charge, those dove-grey dreams of the Germans, riders carried by their momentum to the other end of the encampment, and the eight German dreams remain intact, it was easier on the Marne, two years before the war, Verzy, another war, a war fought with chamber pots, a charge through the streets of a small town, peasants panicking, the women especially, not afraid of animals, give the flat of the sword to a woman who’s thwacking your horse’s legs with a big stick, or the charge at Carmaux, it was miners that time, and ten or so dead.

  In this clearing there are no chamber pots but there are rifles, bayonets and two, maybe three Spandau guns which have cut clear swathes in the first three troops, only just under half the riders have managed to traverse the enemy camp but without doing much real damage, too far to the left of those German dreams, the other half of the dragoons have been unseated, the relatively unscathed try to make it back to cover, a few Germans begin to gather their wits and shoot them down like rabbits.

  There are also Germans lying on the ground, but their dreams are intact.

  Then the lieutenant of the French dragoons who have been held in reserve in the woods orders his fourth troop to charge – to make the most of the enemy’s disarray – a support troop which is in turn decimated by the tap and rattle of the sewing-machine while fifty dragoons who survived the first charge have wheeled round at the far end of the field, their dander up once more, a gallop, less than seven hundred paces a minute, two charges by wounded riders in a pincer movement that encircles the Germans, now to recreate the shock which spikes the guns, a mass moving forward at great speed in a century of speed, a steel pincer which is about to bite on the steel of German dreams.

  The first time he heard the sparrows, saw them in the chandeliers of the brasserie, Max thought it was some sort of joke. When questioned, the waiter answered that many customers had asked that the sparrows be allowed to come and go and tweet in the assembly-rooms, exsoldiers had asked.

  ‘Well now,’ Max had said, ‘I know another tall tale, another extremely poetical story, extremely, provided you give the word poetical a meaning different from the one it had before our war: the story of the Martins and the Thomases.

  ‘Max, they say you were with the dragoons the day they charged the Boches at Monfaubert, tell us about the charge.’

  ‘I wasn’t there!’

  ‘Where were you, then?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Headquarters?’

  ‘Cheeky bastard!’

  ‘Don’t lose your rag, I give up.’

  ‘Yes, more to the east!’

  ‘I don’t see ..

  ‘Everyone’s got it except you! Saint-Rémy! The place where Fournier was killed, I was there just before it happened, second lieutenant of dragoons, different regiment, I charged a flock of sheep.’

  ‘Max, stop messing about.’

  ‘I’m not, the Germans were firing at us, I never say Boches, I never write it either, I’ve got a friend who’s a Boche, we’ve been meeting up once a year since the Armistice, incidentally, do you write Boche with a capital or not when it’s a noun? The German artillery was firing at us, disgustingly accurate it was, we thought we were hidden by a small hill, a ridge, with something peculiar on the top, a man grazing his sheep, poor creatures have got to eat too, the shepherd must have been dead scared, we all were, but there he was, out with his sheep, brave man. We kept changing position, the Germans continued firing at us, the shepherd was in a blue funk, with your naked eye you could see him on the top of the ridge duck down each time a shell went screaming overhead, he tried to make his way back towards us, we shouted for him to stay up there, he couldn’t hear, we made signs telling him to stay where he was, he wasn’t in as much danger as us, but he changed position on his ridge when we did, staying in line with us, about three hundred metres away, a Frenchman who wanted to stay with the French, whatever the risk. We were taking a hammering from the German cannon, we kept moving to avoid their fire, and then the shells would find us again.

  ‘In the end the penny dropped, the shepherd was a scout, all the German gunners had to do was aim over the top of the sheep every time the shepherd stopped, he was giving them the line of fire. So we charged the sheep with lances, we liked the lance, at that stage we were about to make a better world with our lances, we carried carbines slung round our necks, but it was the lance we liked best, a joust.

  ‘The shepherd? We nabbed him, a spy who got two hundred francs a throw, he could have bought himself three overcoats at La Belle Jardinière for that, lined him up and shot him.

  ‘We got hammered in that sector, then we were withdrawn and replaced by fresh troops, infantry, they were ready for a scrap, the 288th, that’s right, Fournier’s lot, and the Germans were eager for a scrap too, that’s what Saint-Rémy was, a poxy wood and a war where you charged at sheep and writers died.’

  The Frenchman at the next table with the big ears, most entertaining, he looks at me as if I were the only woman in his life, he talks in a loud voice, he comes out with some very French names, Martin, Thomas, he might be called something along those lines too, or maybe Duval. He’s watching me in one of the mirrors with eyes that drink, eat, beckon, undress, would like to bite, disappear, garrulous eyes, very French, but not stupid. Now Hans didn’t have garrulous eyes, his looked surprised, frequently surprised, if I’d made a scene about Marie-Thérèse he’d have come down to earth with a bump. He still hadn’t noticed anything or felt anything or anticipated anything, and it was the scene I’d make that would open his eyes.

  We were out walking, I was holding his arm, we met Marie-Thérèse coming towards us, she hardly knew me but called me ‘dear Lena’, she stopped and chatted, Hans was being witty, she laughed and touched his other arm as she laughed, do I dig my nails into her cheeks at this point? Or when she does it again, when she leans unambiguously on his arm, with both hands, so that through my arm I can feel Hans’s body leaning away from me under the pressure of that woman’s hands.

  Marie-Thérèse blushed as she stood there, she wasn’t ashamed of blushing, her neck was uncovered and her throat was suffused with red, Hans looked, he did not look openly the way you’re supposed to when people push something under your nose unceremoniously, no, he glanced at it, pretended he wasn’t looking at all, glanced at me tenderly, and then his eye sidled off again towards that bright redness.

  Max raises one finger, like in school, not like a pupil but like the teacher when he wants to stress the salient point, what you need, friends, is the story of the Martins and the Thomases, names of large families.

  ‘Max, how can you have a poetical tale about large families?’

  ‘Easy,’ Max replies, ‘a dramatic story, group photos, white dresses, a swing in one corner of the photo, interchangeable names and oodles of conflict. Martin, Thomas! That’s Pierre-Emile Martin versus Sidney Thomas, decades of confrontation spent chasing each other up and down statistical graphs, Martin, a decent old cove who hailed from Sireuil in the days of Napoleon III, Catholic, qualified engineer, concerned for the welfare of his workers, more than charitable, and Sidney Thomas ten years later, an Englishman, long-standing quarrel, two names at loggerheads, each despising the other, and no sign of it all finishing, at stake world conquest, with little flags planted in the planisphere of their epic struggle.

  ‘And at times quite staggering profits! shush, not a word, I’ll carry on, at others catastrophic falls on the Stock Exchange, close-down, new start, cycles, crises, competing tooth and na
il for markets, patent for patent, perhaps they even came near to pairing off two of their children, one of Martin’s daughters and one of Thomas’s sons, but in the end there is no marriage, production goes up and up, the women produce fewer offspring, but there are still plenty of faces in the photos, two names, competing, and so, starting from a story about iron ore, Victor Hugo…’

  ‘Max!’

  ‘Oh yes, Hugo, “O Nature, here are thy sublime beginnings”.’

  ‘Max, we all know you’re mad about Hugo, you even went to his funeral.’

  ‘You villain, I wasn’t even born then.’

  ‘In that case, spare us the rest.’

  ‘One more quote and I’ll stop: “At the sound of thy voice thy forces rise up from the glooms of the deep”, to those forces we’ve added jaw-crushers, cone-crushers, cylinder-crushers, hammer-crushers, spiral separators, hydrocyclones, clean iron ore, it’s crushed to produce molten pig-iron and clippety-clop, the carbon in the molten metal is oxidised, and then Bessemer…’

  ‘Max, give me back my tankard.’

  ‘It’s empty.’

  ‘Exactly, the waiter won’t be able to see I need a refill.’

  ‘Too bad, just drink out of my glass instead, I’ll keep your tankard, you’ll see, and Martin, no let’s have Bessemer first, actually it all starts with Bessemer.’

  ‘Or Cro-Magnon man.’

  ‘If you’re going to be like that, I’ll shut up.’

  ‘No, Max, you just carry on now but you can bring it to a speedy conclusion.’

  ‘If you want a story, you’ve got to put in the time.’

  Max holds the tankard at an angle, the Bessemer convener being slightly tilted, Max’s forefinger under the tankard, cold air is blown into the bottom of the blast box at high pressure, the air passes up through the molten mass, a dry splashing, a burst of reddish yellow light, a shower of sparks, the blow eliminates the excess carbon, a bluish flame with a dark tip spurts out of the top, clouds of smoke, sprays of molten metal, the flame grows taller, turns white and clippety-clop, the tankard is horizontal, the Bessemer vessel is tipped up, the pig-iron is decarburised in a quarter of an hour, ingots are cast, Bessemer steel is fantastic, just one problem, the yield is inadequate, which is where my little chums Martin and Thomas come in, quantity, the future’s in quantity, no more converters but vertical furnaces, here, take your tankard, don’t cry.