Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  As if oozing out from its own inner void through this one place, the organisation began to act by itself, outlining solutions ‘for a later date’, no, hardly solutions more like contingency plans for later on, Lilstein’s survival being one of these plans, without anyone in the organisation nor the organisation itself knowing exactly what ‘a later date’ meant, as if somehow a mechanism had been set in motion to save certain victims from the very worst.

  As if the organisation knew, or felt, that some day it might well need to solicit the machinery of its own survival from the victims it had allowed to survive.

  Now Kappler had known Lilstein before all that, the Lilstein who at Waltenberg in 1929 had been impelled by an inner force first to say no and then to work with the fall-out produced by his no, ’twas ever thus, he has always said no, even unto a mark of nought in science at the age of eleven so that his father would get the message, that medicine was out of the question, Kappler knew Lilstein as a revolutionary and the scion of celebrated doctors, a young man who said no to all-comers and wanted to scrap the world and start again, not because the world was suffering or made others suffer but because the world belonged to him.

  ‘An anarcho-materialist, young Lilstein, an anarcho-materialist is just what you are, it makes you likeable but it will bring you a lot of trouble unless you learn to discipline yourself.’

  It was Kappler who told him to read Lenin and, through Lenin, Marx. Kappler hated Lenin yet he told Lilstein to read him when Lilstein was just sixteen years old, because he knew it would help him to survive, you learned Russian so you could read Dostoyevsky, you can use it now to read Lenin. Lilstein became one of the German communists who knew Lenin’s work best, in the original, and Kappler put him on his guard against his own personal sympathies, Rosa Luxemburg, no point reading her, Bukharin ditto, the sin of economism, Kappler admired Bukharin but he advised Lilstein against him:

  ‘I’m not saying you shouldn’t read him because I’m hoping you’ll come to him against my advice, at your age you only read what you’re told not to, but it’ll get dangerous pretty quickly, Trotsky’s dangerous too, utopia and militarism, his enemies say that he’s a snake, it’s not true but Trotskyism has lost its relevance, Lenin’s your man, young Lilstein, the complete works, with Stalin, and Marx through Lenin and Stalin, and Stalin’s going to be increasingly important, of course, not forgetting Engels and the rest of it, the permanent revolution, the worker’s democracy, the end of alienation, all of it is an adolescent dream, there are no free gifts in this world and if you really want to change it then it’s not pretty women you should be cuddling up to but the butcher.’

  In 1929, Kappler telling Lilstein to do what he had never done himself, talking as he scrutinised the large potted papyrus near which they were sitting and Lilstein’s face against the delicate green of the papyrus leaves, a young god, more than a young god, gods do not possess the same will to shape the future, nor wear their soul on their sleeve, Kappler felt behind his words the swell of a gladness he had given up on long ago, a young man’s joy remembered from when the century was young, before the war, when Blériot flew across the Channel in 1909 we were all blissful Europeans, we harnessed forces and controlled explosions and converted them into machines worked by combustion, electric currents, even air-waves, decision-making was a grand affair, you aspired, you did the sums, you made the decision, you built, Hans wanted to build liners, calculate the fine lines of a hull, of airships some day, larger and larger airships, see the countryside from the skies, no more frontiers ever, and show it all to a woman who would have all the qualities of the new century.

  And then one day, the end of joy, the autumn of 1914, the idea had begun to sink in, lights going out all over Europe and fifteen years later these discussions with a young man who dreamed as he once had, told his father he would not study medicine, was fervent about longdistance communications, about supplying the world with a vast invisible network of radiophony and telephony, millions of lines, of wireless beams, billions of words down these millions of lines, directly exchanged, uncontrolled and unexploited by money.

  The young man also wanted the revolution, he’d get over that, perhaps he was right, at least he had the joy of it, he communicated its pulsation if not its contents to his elder. And for the first time since before the war, Hans felt his blood race once more, for the first time.

  No, not the very first: at an earlier point there had been one occasion, shortly after the war, before Lilstein came on the scene. The last time to be honest that Hans had felt as fired up as when he sat talking to this young man in the lounge of the Waldhaus was in 1925, at the offices of the Frankfurter Zeitung in which he had just published a piece, October 1925, he’d received a postcard from the United States, it showed skyscrapers, with three words, in French:

  ‘How are you?’

  Just that, no name, Kappler knew it was from her, no address, she no doubt thought that if she had found a way of reaching him he should be able to do likewise, the postmark said New York, he’d set about writing agreeable, ingratiating letters to all the people he knew in the United States, adding a brief enquiry:

  ‘Would you by any chance have any way of contacting a Madame Hotspur who wrote me a charming letter here at the paper without giving her address? I’d like to thank her, she may be living in New York.’

  He had trotted off to consult Berlin’s collections of America’s leading newspapers to try to find some trace of Lena, he tripped from one paper to the next, maybe she was making a name for herself, research frenzy, go to America, cross the ocean and the States, he got answers to his letters, no information about Lena but replies containing good wishes for him and small requests which his amiable tone had prompted in his correspondents for information about Mr So-and-so whom the writer hadn’t seen for some time, about some girl who would soon be completing her finishing year in old Europe and would it be too much to ask Hans to meet her for a little chat?

  Replies to send, a waste of his time, he regretted having written those letters, a blind alley in his research, he went back to the newspaper collections, only went to the cinema in the hope that he might get to see America in the newsreels or a film, he could have booked a ticket to the United States straight away but his enquiries awoke feelings he feared he would not rediscover when he got there, he delayed his departure, he was afraid of failing, it was his dream. One card, three words.

  That morning for the first time in many years he woke thinking of something other than the business of resuming ownership of his body which he liked less and less. He slept well, Berlin was sinister, Hamburg was sinister but he got up early and the moment he opened his eyes he could see the Manhattan skyline dead ahead, he was on the bridge of the boat that was about to dock.

  There is no longer that roar from the horizon, but another sort of hubbub which stirs him, sirens, to these he sometimes added the water-jets from the fireboats, let’s go, leaving was such a big thing, it wasn’t his enquiries which detained him but the idea that he needed more time to become stronger.

  He wanted a reception like the one they gave Dickens, crowds on the Long Island wharf, for him. Not too big a crowd, he didn’t write popular serials for the newspapers, but lots of reporters, with microphones and questions which allowed him to show how smart he was.

  To reconcile Germany and America, that’s why he’s come! Next he’ll reconcile Germany and the Soviets. It’s all so simple.

  Germany is hungry, America needs markets, forget the fine sentiments, he had long talks with Rathenau before he was assassinated, reduce the debt claimed by the English and France, France especially, the French owe the Americans money, they reckon Germans owe them that money, it’s all quite simple, straightforward, the Americans hold the key, still can’t avoid the fine sentiments, but the solution’s a commercial one.

  All that remains is to devise suitable sentiments to facilitate debt reduction, it’s just like literature, when you read me it’s because you have fai
th in me, you allow me credit but at any moment you can shut the book and say ‘What tripe!’ or else you can take a chance on what comes next. Hans will say that I’m nothing more than a man of letters.

  Talk to them about the things they like, the Americans aren’t savages, they’re as fond of the French language as Hans, ‘The Pronunciophone Company’, it was in Time, a full-page ad, ‘Are you embarrassed by mistakes in pronunciation?’, and to correct these mistakes in pronunciation a set of gramophone records which give the right way of saying hors d’oeuvre, entente cordiale, déshabillé, Poincaré, objet d’art, faux pas, beau geste, en route not forgetting canapé, show them that Germany is also part of Culture which is not just a French preserve, he will have won when ‘The Pronunciophone Company’ of New York will put out records declaiming Gemütlichkeit, Sehnsucht, mein Liebchen, Schadenfreude, no, not Schadenfreude, at least not straight away, make a start with mein Liebchen, so pretty, and philosophy, Bewußtsein, keep Schadenfreude for the Russkies, they know Marx, whenever I’m asked to translate this word I can’t do it, all I can do is say, oh, it’s so German, the pleasure we take from the misfortunes of others whether or not we’ve had anything to do with causing those misfortunes, absolutely essential to import the word to the United States, along with mein Liebchen.

  Hans’s words would cross the entire territory of the United States and finally reach Lena, one of his books in a shop window would catch her eye, she would come to meet him, she would show him New York, night-time, the cascades of lights, stars in the streets, stars in the sky, New York like Hamburg and Berlin only a hundred times more so, the billion stars of the dreaming city and sky, the façades of buildings throbbing with white light, architecture of glass, metal, stone writhing amid the whirling flashing lights, lights which flare aggressively from the shadows, rise dancing to the stars like Hans’s dreams then fall back and project on to walls cascades of scintillating light and words written in fire, that’s what Hans will say to them the day he arrives, at the foot of the gangplank, the microphones, I have come to you, I have come to the city of where the façades of buildings are made of white light, and glass, metal, stone writhe amid the whirling flashing lights which rise dancing to the stars then fall back and project on to walls cascades of scintillating light and words written in fire, New York’s belligerent sleeplessness, machines competing with the sun, machines which murder the old moonlit night, the constant roar and high-speed kicks and pricks, quiet is for the war-wounded, music, rhythms from hell, everything that punches holes in the night, sometimes a light shows, atop a column of darkness, more than sixty floors up, like an eye, like a Cyclops.

  By day they will walk between the metal towers, in the cold air, whenever he lets Lena go first he watches her buttocks, still firm and trim, sway in air as clear as ice which blows in off the sea, the arteries of poverty and luxury, the freshness of the pretty women scrubbed clean with soap and water, the huge litter bins full of the newspapers people have discarded, here you eat fast, you read fast, come on, just do it!

  They hurry on past buildings made of light but built of steel, copper, stone and glass, standing stones in the city, and the bridges, their gateways built of Florentine blocks, passers-by transformed into gymnasts in the reflections, the shining chain mail that is the river, halt halfway across a bridge, feel the throb of power, and the tunnels under the water, and above them the huge transatlantic liners of iron and steel pass like toys.

  The mountain range of the skyscrapers, the city on tip-toe, metal and glass, or else themes of Renaissance palaces multiplied by thirty, a snow-storm that is not to be credited, wind that takes the breath away, air like liquid ice, cars buried under the snow, and the magic of lifts, a single supple silky bound upwards, head for the sky, hardly time to draw breath twice and you’re at the sixty-second floor, the approach of the boat as it arrives from Europe when the new skyscrapers of Manhattan rise suddenly out of the mists of the pulsating morning, all the centuries converge here, sometimes she didn’t have the patience to wait.

  She took him directly to a vast, greedy railway station, the sun pours down from high up on the walls through round windows at least ten metres in diameter and erects in the dust of the concourse giant tubes of light, a train of steel bound for Vermont, a sleeper, she wore pyjamas made from some ultra-soft material, behaved as if they’d been married for ten years, she laughed, it was a sweet time, sometimes he skipped the interlude on the train, saw himself back in a chalet in Vermont, where there are mountains and lots of snow, it was a surprise when he arrived.

  She was by herself, was wearing the big Finnish pullover he’d just seen in a shop window in Rosmar, it reached halfway down her thighs, she is as beautiful standing up as lying down, and if it wasn’t for the snow this could be a ranch, yes, in Texas, there are ranches in Vermont too, he got out a map of the United States and saw that Vermont was more or less on the East Coast, too European, not enough wide-open spaces, not enough appeal, go west, that’s right, make for the Rockies, Colorado, he looked for a name that cast a spell, Aurora, east of Denver, there’s another Aurora west of Chicago, check the index of the atlas, at least thirteen Auroras for all the American States, Walsenburg, also in Colorado, it would be funny if she lived there, if she had a ranch just next to Walsenburg, or maybe she’d be staying in a hotel, not a big one of course, the clients would be regulars, in the evenings guests stay in and read in the lounge or play cards, or just talk, Lena stands, ‘Goodnight everyone’ in a warm voice, she takes the book from Hans’s grasp and gently makes him get up, in front of everyone.

  Alternatively he’d arrive at the ranch in autumn, just as Lena was being charged by a bull, he’d save her, don’t go over the top, make it a horse in a bad temper, no not that either, make it a walking encounter, he would arrive incognito, he’d meet up with her as she was getting back from a walk, arms full of delicate branches and yellow flowers, in the light of the day’s end, an ordinary meeting, you’re just an ordinary man, apparently ordinary, the train, he would revert to the sleeping-car, they are both lying in the upper berth, side by side, they look out of the window, the back of Lena’s neck is almost touching his lips, half a continent speeds by while they caress, Allentown, Harrisburg, Wheeling, Columbus, Champaign, Burlington, Des Moines, Omaha, her buttocks are bare, he is lying against her.

  Lincoln, Sterling, then after Denver there’s Alamosa, he’s not sure if these are stops on a real railway line, so they stay in New York, they walk through the city, they’ve only just met up again, they walk side by side, the crowds, he has begun to like people once more, Lena, he counts the days they could have had together if he’d been able to keep hold of her, how many leaves during the war, she’d have come to Germany, at least before 1917, maybe they wouldn’t have seen each other again during the war, but she’d have joined him in 1918, it’s more than half a dozen years now since the Peace was signed, hundred and hundreds of nights, what a waste, they walk through New York, the ebb and flow of the crowds, now and then their shoulders touch, he takes Lena’s arm to cross the street, no, he’s been told that no true New York woman tolerates that any more, you don’t grab a female New Yorker using the excuse that you’re helping her to cross the street, anyway Lena knows the rules far better than you do.

  They talk as they walk, she says talk to me, which makes him suddenly mute, two or three times during their walk their hands have touched, when she said talk to me it depressed him because in the old days those were the words which signalled that he was about to be scolded, when she felt his mind was somewhere else though he was with her, and here in the street in the middle of New York City, she says talk to me, so you must laugh, talk, whatever, he begins to resent her mentally for asking this so as to ensure that all of a sudden he can’t say a thing, he refuses to look for the exact word for whatever it is when you ask someone to do something and by the very act of asking you prevent the person you’ve asked from doing what you’ve asked, talk to me, he closes up like an oyster, the re
union is already ruined.

  The Lena who has come back is a Lena he had forgotten, the one who says talk to me, hawk-eyed, the one who says ‘you don’t love me, you don’t know how’, blink an eye and she’s gone, he feels close to tears, they’re standing in front of a shop window full of soft toys, huge cuddly clockwork toys, bears mainly, taller than grown men, and Hans starts laughing like a kid as he looks at these mechanical bears, childhood and innocence mixed up with a dirty story about a bear and a hunter, the hunter brings down a huge bear, two metres tall, dances round the corpse, kicks it in the ribs, returns rejoicing to his village, he feels a tap on the shoulder, he turns round, the bear’s there in front of him, two metres tall, right paw raised, claws, the palm as big as the hunter’s head, a smile on the face of the bear, can’t tell the rest, around them kiddies are laughing, Hans laughs until the tears come, he doesn’t want to leave the shop window, Lena laughs to see him like that, come on, she takes his hand to lead him away, won’t let go of it, you’re incorrigible, you deserve a good hiding, what’s got into you?

  He doesn’t dare tell her the story about the bear, the hunter kills a bear two metres tall, he goes back to his village to fetch people to carry the animal back, on the way a tap on the shoulder, it’s the bear, very much alive, on its back legs, two metres, right front paw raised, the bear’s palm as big as the hunter’s whole head, the bear lowers his left paw.

  Hans and Lena walk hand in hand, as they did outside the Waldhaus, in the old days, before the war, their whole future is ahead of them, they’re in the chalet in Vermont, no, in Colorado, she’s cold, he says I’ll warm you up, he is alone on the bridge of the ship, morning, Manhattan, the bliss of arriving, he knows the names of skyscrapers by heart, like he knows the peaks in a mountain range, he hears the boat’s siren, he adds mist, tattered shreds of blue through the mist, it grows clearer and clearer, Hans has stopped wasting his life, that was all a long, long time ago, in 1925, one of his favourite dreams, four years before the Waltenberg Seminar.