Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  Max stands two half-opened books upright in the middle of the table, large vertical smelters, menu for a roof, paper napkin for the floor, decarburise, dephosphorise, desulphurise, these tall furnaces are masters of the world, steel in huge quantities, Thomas’s fining process involves blowing air through the molten ore, then lime and scrap-iron are added and pig-iron appears in the converter.

  Max drops sugar lumps, matches, cigarettes, cigarette-ends between the two books, you wanted a story, well you’ve got one, unabridged, complete with forced air and incineration of all elements, the appearance of red smoke signals the end of the cycle, the cinders are cleaned out, it makes excellent fertiliser for crops, and then ferromanganese is added.

  Max adds coins and even his signet ring, glances up at his companions around the table, how’s that for detail? long live Zola! now who’s next? In Martin’s process, it’s even better, there’s no blowing of air, instead a gas flame is used to raise the smelting temperature of the iron in the furnace, better quality of product.

  The upshot is that there are two types of steel, Martin’s and Thomas’s, and then the fighting starts, Martin’s steel is better, so he has all sorts of problems, one lawsuit after another for infringement of patents, no substance to the charges, but patents only protect the inventor for twenty years, the cases brought by his competitors slow down production, the ploy is to gain time until Martin’s process has fallen into the public domain and can be used by anybody, meanwhile they fall back on Thomas’s process until Martin’s can be exploited without payment of royalties, of course Thomas steel is poorer in quality, but for rails and low-grade purposes it is adequate. And Pierre-Émile Martin? he doesn’t go under but he doesn’t see the financial returns he might have, he retires, an embittered man.

  ‘Max, you promised us a poetical yarn, not a saga!’

  ‘You’ll get it all.’

  Two simultaneous charges by battered dragoons, one from the east and one from the west of the clearing at Monfaubert, remnants of a captainless squadron, the dragoons mount a pincer movement, another dreamlike charge but there is fear and something else, the touch, the taste of horror, their blood is up: scream, do what you never did before, spit out and destroy those dove-grey German dreams, those dreams which face the cavalrymen as they charge from all parts of the field, German dreams which have emerged from a labyrinth, gay as a rower’s straw boater, centuries of waking dreams, of red-chalk sketches, of regrets, architect’s plans, pulleys, projects abandoned and resumed, like clockwork muffled by feathers, like floating drapes hanging by threads.

  When did it all start? The day after Sarajevo, L’Illustration published a large sketch of the event which filled page three, the Archduke falling as he is shot, and opposite on page two the editorial written three days earlier is entitled: ‘We are such spoiled brats’; one of the survivors of that war will be killed in 1944 in the Seine-et-Marne when his train is strafed by a US Lightning. Meanwhile Sarah Bernhardt has a wooden leg, in 1916 she makes a film, she wears a Greek-style tunic and carries a flag which flaps in the wind, she calls down the wrath of France’s fighting men on the Boches, asking in alexandrines ‘that one day by warriors shall their temples be destroyed, their children maimed and women raped’, she also talks of monsters and the extermination of a whole race.

  Hans was standing next to me but that did not stop him staring at the patches of red on Marie-Thérèse’s throat, me, I never blush, I never blushed even when Marie-Thérèse called me ‘dear Lena’.

  I can’t blush. All someone like Marie-Thérèse does is let it happen, she never tries to control herself, she lets herself blush and men interpret it as a promise. They must wonder if the rest of her blushes too, they call her type voluptuous. She was a lot less good-looking than me, she had short legs, it was no good her raising the waist on all her dresses, you could still see that she had short legs. One day, outside the Waldhaus, she had to lower the saddle of her bike, she wasn’t at all happy about that, the Frenchman with the jug ears looks sad, or is it just a trick of the mirrors?

  Max is now well launched, he talks in a loud voice to shut the others up, to forget, to find life again on the other side of despair, to have the time to watch that woman, and simultaneously he has the unbearable feeling of spreading himself too thin, of being less himself the more he talks, a mixture of everything, good for nothing except heaping cinders on the fire, pipe, beer, some day all you’ll be fit for is talking to your slippers, you’ll screw some girl from the Charente on your kitchen table and then tell her the story of your life, there’ll be no one left.

  Max sees the girl from the Charente now, on the table in the brasserie, while he talks to his comrades and watches the woman in the reflecting mirrors, the handsome face of a woman who has better things to do than listen to men talking, she doesn’t smoke, you stand up, turn your back on all these boozy dimwits, and you go off with her, you become a different person, the man you wanted to be fifteen years ago when you walked into the Vieux Paris for a coffee before rushing home to read Aristotle, you look good, she has good breasts, Aristotle in the original and a good time with the woman, back seat of a cab, then throw her out head first, yes but she’s not even looking at you, you haven’t even managed to catch her eye once.

  Listen, in 1914 or 1915, which is where our poetical story really begins, the Reich ministry in Berlin has a sense of its bounden duty, it rejects Thomas shells, Thomas steel is all right for shoeing mules but only Martin steel produces shells that pulverise everything they hit.

  ‘And what shall we do with our stocks of Thomas shells?’ ask the Reich’s steelmakers.

  ‘Sell it all to the Swiss, Swiss requirements in that department are huge, they buy twenty times as many from us as they produce themselves, where do all the shells go? That’s beside the point, there’s got to be profit, Swiss francs, and when the stocks have all gone make more Thomas shells for Switzerland, and ask top prices, respect the cartel, no need to bother your heads who buys them from Switzerland, in any case if Thomas shells fall on our German pillboxes they’ll be landing on good English concrete which can only be bought for Swiss francs, it comes via Holland and Denmark, along with the copper and copra for our explosives, and if we run short of Martin shells at the front, too bad, we’ll buy your Thomases too, says the Reich ministry to the Reich’s steelmakers, jump to it, and you can drop your prices for us.’

  Max glances up, the woman has gone, get up quickly, catch up with her, the cab, but finish the story first, protests from the steelmakers, and Hindenburg orders the Reich ministry to abide by the tariff set by the cartel and ‘give them the price they ask, which is the export price’. I’ve also got a very good story about French army supplies in 1916, but that’ll keep for later. Max starts getting to his feet, shall I retrieve my coat? my hat? They’ll just laugh at me. Max sits down again, he’s just noticed that there’s no one at the beautiful brunette’s table, they’ve all gone, you didn’t see a thing.

  ‘Another round!’ says Max. ‘On me.’

  But let us not forget the real culprit, that straw boater, everything that preceded those few days during which it was waved this way and that under a burning sun, union sacrée, long live France, long live Poincaré, long live the Kaiser, war’s a novelty, a joy, the sacrifice made for one’s country, and last Tuesday morning in the Salle Gaveau Bishop Bolo gave some advice to a thousand young Frenchwomen on how to choose a husband, a long engagement is essential for you to get to know one another, for a fiancé is the most beguiling kind of liar, you will need time to get him trained, separation and the war are blessings in disguise, in the big stores, the girls who get paid three francs a day for a fifteen-hour day demand more chairs.

  It will encourage laziness, say the directors, a sordid business having something like that brought up, the strike has been broken, and from Biskra, Monsieur Chiarelli, the distinguished entomologist, has sent us two splendid photographs of scorpions, one of a mother no doubt panic-stricken devouring her yo
ung, and one of an adult male devouring another, with the last three joints of the tail and the poisonous sting sticking out of the mouth of the victor.

  For the dragoons at Monfaubert there are eight targets, eight dove-grey dreams as splendid as myths, each with its own great wings, a span of fourteen metres secured by wires finer than the guys of the finest sailing boats, forty square metres of aerofoil, a stream-lined fuselage made of canvas and light wooden struts, a stubby vertical mast between the engine and the pilot, a complex system of cables supporting wings (conceived and designed by observing the flight of a zanonia seed) with a span of fourteen centimetres, a perfectly rounded leading edge and a gracefully flowing trailing edge.

  Igor Etrich, a first-rate engineer, multiplied the proportions of the outer shell by a hundred, added a pigeon-tail rear-end together with a six-cylinder in-line Mercedes engine, 120 horse-power, sweet dove-grey chargers, the century’s new weapon of the skies, the Taube, one of them dropped two small bombs on Paris on 13 August.

  The cavalrymen charge these new replacements on behalf of all the cavalries in the whole wide world, aircraft, airplanes, also known as aeroplanes, ’planes, the monoplanes Hans looks after, though in civilian life he is a naval engineer, novelist and dreamer, the army had turned him into a private in the infantry but quickly reassigned him as chief air mechanic in the first days of the war when the skies are still relatively free, pilots climb to almost 2,000 metres singing a snatch of song behind their propellers and return to base with bullet holes in their wings and a few snippets of information about the enemy, they smell of hot oil, their faces and hands are as oily as their engines but they wear fleece jackets costing a thousand marks a throw, are billeted in a château, drink champagne as they discreetly compare genealogical notes.

  Up there, the war is almost clean, some opponents are still at the stage of saluting each other, they don’t use parachutes, the dream of Icarus runs through their veins.

  Marie-Thérèse almost fell off her bike twice, she had to lower the saddle, she wasn’t at all pleased, Hans told her you mustn’t have it too high, it’s the wind that does it, the wind resistance, so funny, I didn’t say anything and no one mentioned her little legs. After that Hans held her bike, one hand under the saddle and the other on the handlebars, Marie-Thérèse laughed, she was wearing trousers, apparently where she comes from women aren’t allowed to wear trousers except for riding a horse or a bike, but at home she never rode a bike, she laughed but she was trying it on, Hans had his hand under her saddle, and there was nothing I could say. She could blush at will, she knew how to make the most of her blushes, I’ve always been told I thought too much about love, Hans had shapely hands, smooth skin, every time I thought of it I’d tell myself that woman is going to find out what Hans’s skin tastes like, that hand has no business being under her saddle. People say that being jealous can make you fall in love, it made me feel awkward, when she looked at him I thought he seemed so conceited. One evening, on the main staircase in the Waldhaus, he was telling me all about cycling, he’d read that bicycles spelled death for book sales, because people spent so much time riding them, cycling two or three hours every day, which was time taken away from reading, it was a real threat, he stopped one floor too soon, I couldn’t keep it to myself, I said ‘this is only Marie-Thérèse’s floor’.

  That sad-looking Frenchman with the big ears just now in the restaurant, Frenchmen stare at women a lot and just carry on talking to their companions, a woman like Marie-Thérèse would have got up.

  Max knocks over the books on the table, returns the menu to the waiter, retrieves his coins and ring, empties his glass, the truth needs to be believed before it can be understood, the real culprit was the summer, the straw boaters we gaily tossed towards the enemy, the quick-tempered heat of that glorious summer when Jean Bouin ran the fearsome distance of nine kilometres seven hundred and twenty-one metres in thirty minutes, which was some going, we even hunted rats: identical hunting scenes on both sides of the front, rats hanging by their tails from wires strung between poles, the cook claimed he could make rat jam, we laughed, he’s a real card, the style they called Charm, said the cook, I remember it well, I was head sales assistant, the skirt fitted very closely over the hips, swelled out in the shape of a bell and reached down to the ground with a train at the back, scooped-out necklines with satin-stitch, go on, cook, tell us more, some rats are as big as 75 mm shells, the .75 is the expression in metallic form of the marvellous qualities of our race, flooding brings the rats out, they swim among us at knee level, the general said we had to stay in the water, the CO said, ‘Don’t knock your brains out over it’, and a voice piped up: ‘The bullets will do that for us.’ And on the role of the African infantry and the Moroccan cavalry one general would write one autumn day: ‘Use before winter.’

  And sometimes there’s too much water, in one night at Neuville-Saint-Vaast, the trenches of both sides were flooded to the top, all the men climbed out and faced each other a hundred metres apart, and for hours and hours no one fired a gun, no one killed anybody, a wag said, ‘If it goes on like this, they’ll soon be building an Ark.’

  At other times, much later on, there are men who don’t want to kill or die any more, but they die pleading, wetting their trousers, their comrades dragging them to the stake, others stink even more, they struggle, they have to be tied to a chair while they scream, the colonel said, like women.

  Bastards! screams one of the condemned men, you go on and on killing – that’s why you’ll always be slaves, the chair tips over, lash that chair to the stake says the colonel, the officers are forced to put more and more men out of their misery, some mutineers have been hit by only three bullets and none of them well placed, an officer yells at the firing squad he commands, every man who shoots wide is a coward, you ought to be ashamed, look at him, he’s still moving.

  Other mutineers die standing up, spitting defiance.

  Two men different from the rest: they face the firing squad and sing the ‘Marseillaise’ and the ‘Chant du départ’; first they embraced the officer commanding the squad, that’s it, refused to obey the order to attack, found guilty at the double, a priest and a socialist MP had talked to them all through the night, an honourable death, you must do the decent thing, you say you’re sorry and you face the firing squad and sing so that your comrades may still have enough strength to snatch victory from the shadows, the priest’s cross and the MP’s hands, you will set us all an example, we all want peace through victory.

  Also a woman, who comes and speaks in the cell, what about our two daughters, daughters of a hero or a traitor, they said that if you say you’re sorry, if you sing the ‘Marseillaise’, they’ll just write ‘killed in action’ in the book, the officer said:

  ‘What chance will a coward’s daughter have of finding a husband?’ The daughter is two years old, not for eleven years will a friend tell her the truth, when Poincaré has become the man who laughs in cemeteries, yes, one of the two men sentenced to death was that schoolteacher, Robert, the one with the holiday cottage and the month’s rent, the ‘Marseillaise’ and the ‘Chant du départ’, everyone could believe again, they embraced, they stood at the stake and wept.

  Eight Tauben lined up, a plane of exactly this type and make has just set a new altitude record at 6,200 metres, the world spread out below is a marvel. The machine guns defend these dreams, they continue to cut down French dragoons, they decimate the fourth troop which charged in support, but one section of the dragoons succeeds in breaking through the line of fire, and others in position at the far end of the clearing also come riding up, one of the planes has had time to begin moving, it gains speed, waddles like an exasperated chicken on the churned-up grass. Two or three dragoons try to give chase, the horses take fright, still needs another three hundred, two hundred revs to reach the 65 kilometres an hour needed for take-off, in the bottom of his ditch Hans hears the signs, a hundred and fifty revs, he calculates the plane’s chances, he knows each o
f the six in-line cylinders in each of his eight aircraft while the plane bumps along with increasing speed over the uneven surface.

  Already its pilot has stopped thinking of anything except those trees dead ahead. The observer in the rear seat has a large repeating rifle and takes aim at the dragoons, keep thinking of what you love.

  Hans hears the noise of the engine, a woman glides on to a frozen lake, why? The sound of the engine, death, he takes the woman’s hand, puts his arm around her waist, a picture, a lake in the mountains, keep thinking of what you love, the sound of an aeroplane exasperated because it cannot take off, it battles with every tussock, never volunteer for anything, the engine is getting too much fuel, the pilot’s going to flood the carburettor, pound to a penny it’s Klaus, he never could do it right, and the second piece of advice, think, a village at one end of the mountain lake, a waterfall at the other, is this really the moment to think about what you love? Early winter keen-cold, sound of an engine, revs almost there, the sleeve now, robins panicking in the frost, early-morning skaters, light from a red disc, pale and austere, the same actions in unison, Hans and the young woman move out across the ice each leaning on the other, in turn.