Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  They had their regular place by a window, near a very tall papyrus, a horticultural miracle in a pot at this altitude of 1,700 metres. Kappler always treated the young man as an equal, he would order two coffees and two Armagnacs, you look a lot older than your age, young Lilstein, and you don’t smoke, which is a sign of self-control, but this will be your one and only Armagnac for this evening, are we agreed? Does Kappler remember everything that I can’t even remember myself? I don’t drink Armagnac any more, just coffee, did I take it with sugar in those days? nowadays it’s one lump in the cup and the other in the spoon to dunk in the coffee, what the French call a canard, and if there’s a third lump I leave it or treat myself to another canard, I never put two in the cup, or only rarely, and it’s a bad idea, it makes me feel slightly nauseous, Kappler was already one of the world’s great figures and – apart from the Armagnac – he treated an adolescent as an equal in furious arguments about ideas, he never took sugar with his coffee, he dipped his sugar lumps in the Armagnac, he had no children of his own.

  Lilstein would contradict Kappler furiously, admiring him nonetheless, Kappler went out of his way to provoke his fury.

  Even today Kappler knows more about Lilstein than Lilstein knows about himself, he knows that Lilstein is aching to ask him:

  ‘Did you ever see her again?’

  He knows all about that side of Lilstein that the years have covered over but that has not gone away, nothing ever goes away for good, everything that has continued to grow in Lilstein in a shadow which even Lilstein himself prefers to ignore, everything in him that is always ready to say no, the urge always to say no, the feeling that he has an inner strength that impels him not to align himself with a Minister who scratches his arse in front of his Department Heads.

  On those evenings at Waltenberg, in the great drawing-cum-reading room of the Waldhaus, after that day’s Seminar debates, Kappler would smile as he talked to Lilstein who, at fifteen or sixteen, was taller, looked older than his age and was building a new world with violence and adjectives, you are a rebel, young man, you are not sufficiently docile to be a true revolutionary and build new worlds, you must learn discipline, as it is you are merely a rebel, and even though you may not have broken discipline you have wanted to, the idea of making some seditious gesture is always at the back of your mind, you claim you want to make a new world but your true gift is for the rebellious gesture, even when you do not act you enjoy the pleasure of the rebellious gesture, a guilty pleasure, I’m pretty sure that the first time you were sent to school your mama slipped your hand into the headmaster’s and left the room backwards, a headmaster so proud to have been entrusted with the progeny of two Doctor Lilsteins, man and wife, you weren’t the least upset when you saw your mother leave, rather you were curious about the new things that were happening, you didn’t cry, though you did bite the headmaster’s hand, I’m quite certain your brother told me about it, he laughed when he told me about that and the cuff the Headmaster gave you in return, freedom is useless if you can’t bite the hand that holds you, the rebellious gesture, in the name of freedom, the urge to do anything, even burn the place down, anything, a look all around the room from Kappler, anything except the innocence of these people! yes, it’s just bourgeois psychology, but remember: the taste for the rebellious gesture will always be part of you!

  Kappler nodded towards the small groups of well-dressed people, like themselves, who were talking heatedly in the lounge of the Waldhaus, and Lilstein smiled with the satisfaction of having made a breakthrough, of seeing that Kappler was not far from sharing his own hostility to these people.

  Not far from the corner where he and Kappler were talking, a man was sitting next to a woman in an easy chair, his name was Neuville and he was talking in a clear voice to a group of people who were standing, in his hand were several sheets of rolled-up paper, talking without being interrupted:

  ‘The unit designed to measure human work called the Neuville or the N unit is a universal unit representing the quantity of available physiological energy which can be expended by a normally constituted human being in one minute.’

  Neuville did not talk as if he were addressing a public meeting, he spoke in a steady voice, slowly, without giving the impression that he was delivering a lecture, but rather that he was sharing the pleasure of such a satisfying definition, he was wearing a double-breasted tweed suit, loose-fitting, grey with a faint green thread running through it, the same kind of suit favoured by Lilstein’s father who, however, did not care for green thread on grey, but his mother said the green cheered it up and she had the last word, the man who was speaking in the steady voice had everything that life can offer, and to it he added a benevolence of word and look:

  ‘In measuring the quantity of available human energy, allowance is made for the appropriate amount of rest required when the human in question, under normal conditions, carries out the actions and makes the physiological effort demanded by the industrial tasks for which he has been fitted and trained, at a rate which is equal to three-quarters of the normal rate of physiological exertion during the course of a normal day’s work…’

  A German woman stood drinking in Neuville’s words, from time to time the woman in the easy chair gave her a very blank look, Neuville went on:

  ‘… a level of exertion which must leave the worker still able to fulfil his familial and societal obligations, that is to expend each day the same amount of physiological energy without producing any deleterious effect on his health or individuality.’

  Neuville, a man of clearly articulated speech, who used silences designed to enable the listener to ponder his words or examine his suit, like an actor who knows that no one will interrupt his monologue save to acquiesce. It was unbearable:

  ‘Taylor failed to take account of fatigue and the need to renew the strength required for working – only the Neuville Unit measures the phenomenon in its entirety.’

  To Lilstein, it was intolerable, a hotel lounge is intended for conversation, these people listen to him before he’s even said anything, a servile bunch, shut this capitalist up, let him gather his lackeys around him somewhere else, Lilstein is sixteen, lashings of frustration to get out of his system, scandal, create a scandal, administer a public lesson to this mix of idealist visionary and evil bastard, he turns towards Neuville and hears him say:

  ‘To earn my crust when I was a young man in the USA, I worked behind the counter of a whiskey store.’

  Now for the story of my success! Lilstein waits for the pause, in it he intends to ruin the speaker’s effect.

  ‘We sold three different kinds of bottle at three different prices, quarter dollar, half dollar and one dollar, it was my introduction to capitalism: for all three prices they got the same quantity of the same whiskey.’

  Suddenly Lilstein tells himself that he can learn something from such cynicism and he too begins to listen.

  One day, much, much later, Lilstein would say with the categorical certainty that only a man who has passed through Auschwitz then the Gulag can aspire to:

  ‘Capitalists are cynics.’

  Smiles on the faces of the members of the Politburo’s Special Economic Committee. Lilstein continues:

  ‘They claim to lead crusades but basically they are cynics selling junk.’

  More smiles. Lilstein goes on:

  ‘But the trick is that they put a value on that junk, while we, who reject cynicism, are stuck with junk which has no value at all.’

  No smiles now, the men newly appointed to run the economy just wonder why they were being attacked like this, in the name of what other group could Lilstein be speaking, for wasn’t he a member of the group which had helped them up the ladder to their new responsibilities, Lilstein having even furnished them, thanks to his contacts, with invaluable information about capitalist products and techniques, why this observation about worthless junk? Was it an about-turn by Lilstein? A lurch in the direction of the reactionaries and fanatical advocates of h
eavy industry? Or was he in the process of reaching an understanding with some more advanced splinter group made up of irresponsible elements set on restoring capitalism on the specious argument that productivity is productivity? Or had he just been trying to be clever? He certainly had a reputation for never being able to resist a Witz, even of the sour variety. Difficult chap to keep a check on, just looks out for number one.

  Long ago, in Waltenberg, the man talking about the Neuville system had added:

  ‘Three separate prices but it was always genuine whiskey, my first lesson in capitalism, everything is relative, as our young friend Tellheim would say.’

  Lilstein had decided not to create a scene. Tellheim was a young physicist who’d been invited to this same Seminar in the spring of 1929 to give lectures on relativity, he spoke of lifts, two lifts moving in parallel over the façade of an immensely tall skyscraper, like the ones they have in America, when both start to move the passengers in Lift One drop various objects out of the window, umbrellas, hats, handbags, the objects fall, dropping away beneath them at a speed of 981 centimetres per second, that is at a speed which increases by 981 centimetres every second, assuming the absence of any kind of resistance.

  Tellheim did not try to grab people’s attention, he just spoke of what he knew, that’s all, you felt you were there in the lift with him, you couldn’t stop yourself, and while Lift One starts going down in the normal way at the normal speed, Lift Two plunges into the void at a speed of 981 centimetres a second, impelled by the same force as the falling objects, which is to say the force of gravity, the passengers in Lift Two no longer feel their feet pressing down on the floor, their wallets cease to weigh anything in their pockets, and if they drop their hats, bags and brollies these objects remain suspended in mid-air before their very eyes, whether the hats be made of feathers or of lead.

  And these passengers in Lift Two can see the objects dropped from Lift One floating just next to them, if you follow me, so that at exactly the same moment some passengers can see hats falling and others see them suspended in front of them, what does it take for a lift to be able to reach this speed? well, let’s say provided there’s no friction or resistance and that at the instant the lift started moving the cable snapped cleanly, a hypothesis that can easily be tested. Tomorrow evening, I’ll tell you about trains and how, to an observer standing on the platform, a train passes through the station less quickly than for an observer sitting in the train, and the day after tomorrow it will be the curve which is the shortest distance in the universe between two points.

  Tellheim and Lilstein had become instant friends.

  In the drawing-cum-reading room of the Waldhaus in 1929, the women were very beautiful, and they looked the men straight in the eye.

  ‘They’ve just discovered that ideas make eyes shine more brightly than kohl.’

  This thought had been one of several to catch the fancy of the billiard players, but no one claimed to have said it first. Sometimes Lilstein watched the young French girls but his eyes lingered particularly on a tall red-haired woman who looked at him in the sweetest way, they’d gone cross-country skiing with some French girls, one of these had said to one of her friends:

  ‘In three years, he’ll be gorgeous.’

  The other one had replied:

  ‘What’s wrong with him now?’

  And whenever Kappler caught Lilstein looking at a woman he would repeat with a smile:

  ‘Anything – except the innocence of these people!’

  Sometimes a friend of Kappler’s would join them, a French journalist with big ears, funny man, he was jealous of Lilstein and made scenes, shush! not a word, this is nothing to do with you, when he’s with you he becomes young again, all I do is remind him of old horrors in the mud of long ago and the new horrors I go in search of in this vast world of ours, do you know in what receptacles the Head of the Medico-Legal Institute in Paris keeps the brains that interest him after he’s completed an autopsy? chamber pots, and do you know why? He claims it’s because nothing else fits the shape of the brain as well. Strange. Every time I say ‘do you know?’ it’s to tell of some new horror. Do you know how French military posts in Morocco during the Riff wars were not so long ago supplied with water?

  Kappler’s French friend would take his time, twisting his glass round and round, giving the impression that he believed the answer would not be long in coming from his listeners, his ears gave him a comical, genial look, the ladies would press him, he would add, take twenty-five downtrodden privates with an officer who fancies himself as Roland and is looking for an Oliver to die with, and hundreds of Saracens all around them, Berbers, they’re more chivalrous than Saracens except for one appalling habit, when they take prisoners they cut them open, stuff their innards full of rocks and camel dung, don’t even wait for their captives to die before tearing their tongues out, experts who study these things call this rural rites of execration, obviously these men from the Riff are on home ground, their land has been defiled, oh yes, the water, it comes by plane along with a couple of military medals, no, the planes don’t land, they drop supplies on the post. How do they manage to do that with water? The first time I heard it in a radio message I almost burst out laughing: ‘Under siege, send blocks of ice.’

  Maybe Kappler was mistaken about Lilstein when he spoke of his ‘gift for the rebellious gesture’, and ‘guilty pleasure’. In those days, Lilstein gave short shrift to all that bourgeois psychology, those pronouncements about pleasure and innocence, but now he can see things he didn’t see when he was an adolescent or even before he met Kappler, a gobbet of chewed-up blotting-paper splatting against a blackboard in school for instance, the teacher points to the gobbet and asks who did that, it didn’t matter that the young Lilstein was innocent, he always turned bright red, he hadn’t done anything but he could easily have had the idea of throwing the gobbet, his head was permanently full of mischief, he never actually did anything but when a gobbet of spittle-sodden blotting-paper went splat against the blackboard, he always thought it was a quality jape.

  And he would blush bright red. Or maybe he was guilty of something else, the maid’s armpits for example, he’d stare at them when she was dusting the chandeliers at home, and when the teacher pointed to the gobbet and asked who did that, Lilstein would turn red because he’d had the idea of the gobbet, because he was still thinking of the maid’s armpits and behind the maid’s armpits was another episode, the business of the grain of rice shot at the same maid’s backside with an air-gun; blushing was his handicap, the minute anyone started talking about things that shouldn’t be done he blushed crimson, it took him years to control it, sometimes he looked so guilty that he got sent out of the classroom and made to stand in the corridor.

  There he would wait for the teacher on duty to come round, there was just a chance that the teacher might not appear and interrupt this really rather pleasant interlude in which crimes and punishments cancelled each other out in his imagination as he got his own back on the real culprit of a misdemeanour everyone got out of pretty easily, since being sent out of class was supposed to be the worst punishment going.

  At breaktime, with his friends, Lilstein could silently enjoy being the character he’d just invented, which was that of someone who stood his ground and was consequently the moral superior of whoever it was who, by not owning up, had left him to face the full fury of the authorities.

  And since the boy who had not owned up was generally class top dog, his kind was ultimately indebted to Lilstein for a portion of the cowed respect they extracted from their classmates with fist and foot.

  However reassuring he found his status as an innocent but virile victim, Lilstein had finally come to see that a little emotion may also be taken as a sign that you are more innocent than those who remain stonily impassive, so that he who was forever blushing, you know, young and full-blooded, too tall for his age, is forever making up stories in his head, just you start talking about girls, you’ll see, to th
e roots of his hair, it’s unstoppable, or else make a few general remarks about spoiled brats.

  Later, Lilstein’s superiors, his colleagues, his instructors during his time in Moscow or the imprisoned comrades he knew in the camps, both the one run by the Nazis and the other one, all knew him as a quiet, meticulous man, he was always one step ahead of the game but a little fragile, always going slightly red in the face, he never looked as if he could lie, he was easily flustered, and his interrogators at the Lubyanka who sat him on a stool and grilled him in relays twenty-four hours a day before sending him to a special camp all knew that he was a decent sort, that he’d got snarled up in the system, but that he was a decent type.

  Now a man who blushes when a question is put to him is obviously guilty, but no more so than anyone else, if they’d put their minds to it they could have taken him apart, broken him, made him cry, made him say anything, but they couldn’t go too far, especially not risk killing him, no one had given orders one way or the other, but everybody knew.

  When Abakumov or his direct assistants failed to come in person and put their union seal on the work of the professionals, the professionals avoided doing too much, especially when the subject remained calm and blushed, though not too much. Lilstein had problems but went on being a decent sort, as if someone in the shadows had decided to anticipate the real enforcers and do Lilstein minor damage to save him from worse, some person or persons, or not anybody, perhaps nobody had taken charge of the matter, an empty box in the chart of the organisation’s hierarchy, an oversight which had as many consequences as, if not more than, any specific action taken by a person or persons.