Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  Once again he is in the lounge of the Waldhaus for the 1929 European Seminar, he is talking to this obstreperous adolescent who wants to reach out and take the whole world in his arms, he feels invaded once more by the same fierce joy as a journey to New York produces in him, he could leave at the end of the Seminar, with this young man, not New York, this time, but Venice.

  Sitting behind Kappler and Lilstein at the Waldhaus in his easy chair in the main lounge, the man holding forth on the Neuville index, he of the strictly measurable quantity of human energy, had concluded his little talk, he was speaking now of his château in Italy, grounds infested with vipers, only one way of dealing with them, offer a reward for every viper brought in dead, to begin with it worked very well but after a while we realised that it had given rise to a thriving trade in dead vipers which extended for over a hundred kilometres, and moreover the locals deliberately left enough reptiles roaming through the grounds to ensure that we went on being a weeny bit scared.

  Kappler smiled, spoke of the usefulness of vipers in the world of politics, Kappler, the absolute democrat, told Lilstein to read Lenin and Stalin because he thought it would save him, Lilstein was a cultured young man who was hurtling towards communism while letting his mind stray from time to time to the maid’s armpits and regretting the business with the air rifle, Kappler wanted him to be armed:

  ‘And don’t be one of those fools who shout out randy old snake every time some socialist gets up to speak.’

  And very soon Lilstein was quite capable of making a connection between the instructions of Stalin and expressions used by Lenin, he even guessed several months in advance which of Lenin’s phrases Stalin would actually use, he repeated snippets once or twice, without seeming to be quoting anyone, and one day that same quote surfaced in one of Stalin’s pronouncements, it made certain comrades shake in their shoes, it’s the sort of thing that enables a man to rise in an organisation, that and arriving at the right time, respecting deadlines, knowing how to handle the files, how to report back, in a few sentences of not more than ten words each, and doing nothing before receiving precise instructions, written or verbal but always in front of witnesses.

  He had one other precious quality: he never seemed sure of himself; he appeared both remote and anxious, this is what saved Lilstein later on his stool in the Lubyanka, in the early 1950s, the impression he gave his captors of feeling slightly guilty, no indignant protests, nor stubborn resistance nor cooperation in making disclosures nor garrulity either, he looked at the lamp when they told him to look at the lamp and when they turned the lamp away he looked at the telephone, as if he were expecting a call which would bring this mistake to an end.

  Occasionally he would look up at the man interrogating him, simply to avoid a possible ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you’, but not for very long either, so as to escape a ‘stop looking at me with those cretinous eyes’, and from time to time make a slip, say one word instead of another, or a ‘I don’t recall’ to allow the interrogator to unload his aggression, never allow him to get to the hate stage, hands, look at their hands, don’t provoke the moment when they form into fists or when they’re placed flat on the desk, don’t concern yourself with other people, the underlings, a slap in the face, or even the ear, that stuff doesn’t matter, the one to watch is the man sitting facing you, or maybe on occasion it’s someone who steps noiselessly into the room, you haven’t turned round but you sensed he was there by the way the one who is sitting straightened, never let them fill up with anger or calmness, you’ve only one hope, the stool is vile but that’s because it doesn’t show any traces, they don’t want to do you too much damage, if your morale remains good that gives you a way forward, they haven’t yet handed you over to the butchers, there’s no one yet who is anything like the ones he’d encountered before, kein Warum, here you can, you could ask, you still have a full set of fingernails, make them want to keep you here.

  Lilstein was a useful kind of a guilty party for the average accusers who are only too well aware that there isn’t much in the file, he wasn’t innocent, in those days they ended up liquidating the innocent, no one was going to admit to a mistake, with the guilty things were more violent, they howled like dogs as they died and then it was all over, whereas with someone like Lilstein with his little lies, his mild protests, his way of correcting previous statements, it all served to allow the mills of daily routine to keep turning, between two other much more significant cases, and he really did know Lenin’s writings.

  Lilstein would stare at the phone as if he were expecting a message, sometimes his eyes were completely focused on the effort of watching the phone, a toad made of black bakelite, circular dial pad, very ugly, one day the man in charge said to him:

  ‘Obviously this is only a side issue, but do you really like my phone?’

  The answer would have been very complicated. In normal life Lilstein feels increasing loathing for the telephone, especially at work, you think there’s just the two of you talking, and an army of men in headphones are recording your every word, it’s a gruesome instrument, suitable only for people who won’t find the time to deal with each other face to face, but when he was young he’d been mad about phones and radio, and telephone sets, the genuine article, the kind that had a personality, Berlin, 1925, an exhibition devoted to the history of the telephone – and one of the ways he had of holding firm at tricky times in his life, outside that is of reciting his favourite poems silently to himself, was to review in his mind his collection of old phones, the ones he had started buying when he was twelve, plus all those he had acquired later, the whole lot having disappeared during raids by the Gestapo and the KGB, his collection having disappeared twice, the memory of it having grown increasingly faint, he never tried to build it up again.

  Henceforth he makes do with catalogues, all the catalogues he acquires whenever the opportunity arises, the ones his colleagues bring back for him from missions, as souvenirs, certain missions coincide sometimes splendidly with an exhibition or sale, no, that’s just a piece of friendly libel, he no longer collects telephones, they take up too much room, the loss is too great when the cops come on heavy-handed and take them off you – catalogues you can find in a library – he also has sets of old instructions, and plans discovered in factory archives for installing and repairing equipment.

  Besides, after all, it was with catalogues, designs, photos that he’d started, with pictures of women on the phone, one of them, from a very old magazine dating from around the turn of the century, a young woman standing, waist pinched tight, a low-cut dress, a V accentuated by the forward thrust of her bosom, she is holding the ear-piece of a phone to each ear, her arms are raised as required by the action, while below the belt which picks out her waist, her pose, which shows her turned slightly to one side, enables the viewer to devine the delicious swell of both her abdomen and rump, Lilstein recalls the words underneath which said that the girl was ‘romantic’, and there was also another woman, less beautiful, it was a photo of her, she had a definite edge over the bright young people of the time since she posed in a nightdress, with no corset, the result being a generous fullness which concealed her figure but let you sense nakedness underneath, the nightdress had a lower neckline than the other girl’s dress, it had sleeves which allowed perfectly bare forearms to project, when you were thirteen the thing was to imagine the first girl with the tight corset wearing the other one’s costume, and with the appropriate curves.

  There was a third engraving, a greetings card, a source of further fertile elaborations of the image, an English drawing room, a young lady of fashion, her back three-quarters turned to the viewer, she was holding out with both hands and considerable grace a telephone receiver about fifteen centimetres long, her dress left the upper part of her back naked, the top of her shoulders, nape of her neck, ears, the pendant at her throat, arms bare from the shoulder-joint to the elbow where her gloves stopped, the eye returned to her back whose dynamically arched line lau
nched sweet reveries, the arch ending at its most prominent point in a bow from which cascaded the folds of an ample satin skirt, Lilstein did not dare lock his bedroom door.

  ‘Your son,’ Herr Lilstein remarked to his wife, ‘is for some incomprehensible reason obsessed by Belle Époque telephones.’

  It was true, a magnificent model with magneto and cranking handle, in the style of a sewing-machine, with a plinth made of cast-iron, black cast-iron, lacquered, the combined receiver-and-speaker slung horizontally on a cradle which acted as a switch when the receiver was lifted, the cradle was nickel-plated and embellished with symmetrical bows and medallions, there were gold filaments running horizontally along each side of the plinth, or rather it was a framing strip, yes, an Ericsson 1907, and another model, a Sauerwein 1913, his favourite, a base of fine mahogany, darkened and French-polished, on which stood a chrome-plated lyre, I’m sure the upper part was decorated with laurel leaves, no, it was acanthus, and the fixed microphone was located in the top of the lyre.

  Lilstein can no longer say how the receiver was held, he loved phones and the radio, the crystal set he and friends from school had made together, he was still dreaming about it in 1929, radio, telephones, you turn a knob or a handle and someone far away becomes your brother in a few words, another voice telling Lilstein not to mix things up, the telephone is not society, the society which advances by class conflict, but even so, if everyone is enabled to talk freely to everyone else, then there’s hope.

  ‘You know,’ said the KGB officer who had searched his house in Potsdam in 1951, ‘all these handsets and catalogues and telephone literature, it’s what they call a hobby, it’s a very English thing, you have very English tastes, they could cost you dear.’

  But no one ever raised the matter again. Lilstein tried to stop thinking about his phones and start concentrating on his poems.

  The Gestapo, the camps, fealty, the KGB, the water torture, the stool, the telephone, his poems, May, the merry month of May in a boat on the Rhine, the excursion turned out badly, the telephones with their moulded materials, box, mahogany, each kind of wood carefully polished, walnut, pine, and also ivorine, he’d had to look up what ivorine was, plus the chrome, brass and nickel used for the cross pieces and uprights, shapes like stretching necks, patterns picked out on a small teak stand perched on four claw-and-ball feet, or on the contrary a thing of flight and fancy like the Siemens which looked like an ampersand or a treble clef, a simple metal chrome-plated stem braced itself at an initial loop before thrusting upwards, like a curved serpent, an arched and watchful serpent, and then steadied itself and ended in a scroll inside its own swirl, but allowing a budded branch to escape on which the receiver came to rest, this was his favourite, a treble clef, a snake, the colonel, the big office in Berlin, the minister who scratched himself, Pravda, the slide, frozen up or not: had Kappler foreseen all this when he’d advised him to read Lenin?

  What is Lilstein to Kappler? Lilstein, an adolescent encountered once again after an interval of almost thirty years with all the allowances he’d made for the adolescent, thirty years, when exactly did bakelite replace ivorine? Someone who had survived everything, still ‘wearing a halo of progressive light’? Or one of those types that officials in Bonn described to Kappler when they tried to dissuade him from returning to Rosmar, fair enough, OK, Herr Kappler, men of Lilstein’s sort have been through a lot, Auschwitz or Stalin’s camps or both, they’ve been put through the mangle but they’re no angels, they’re killers too, they have people killed to defend the purity of their Democratic Republic, they like having flowers on their desks but they kill, wound, break people for life, don’t take our word for it, Herr Kappler, we’re policemen, you can despise us, you can tell us the only reason we’re here is to keep an eye on the money in the bank vaults but over there it’s worse, they keep an eye on everything, not money, there isn’t any, but everything else, at least reread Koestler, or go and listen to what two or three exiles are saying, we know you’re not afraid of anything but don’t give your backing to those bastards, no, we’re not alike, we don’t go that far, we don’t need to, we don’t have an empire to hang on to, like those idiots the French, our hands are clean, have been for the last ten years, at least.

  Max has also put Hans on his guard, he didn’t want to see him go back to the GDR, those are gang bosses they have over there, they give an order, Hans, and people disappear, in the fog, those people keep an eye on everything, even in the fog, you might think I’m going over the top with this, with my big words, tyranny, terror, a journalist’s words, you might not give a toss, but you can at least listen to a story, a very short story, you’ve always liked symptoms, six months ago I was in Dresden, with some English journalists, two English communist journalists, yes there are such things, and an official minder, a car, one of the Englishmen drove it, it was his own car, a privilege, drove very carefully, accompanied by the minder with hobnail boots, in the fog the Englishman strays on to tramlines, Hans, it wasn’t anything, not even doing twenty, catches a low cement road-divider, no need even to straighten a bumper.

  But the minder insists that the incident be reported to the police immediately, they start to laugh, eleven at night, suburbs of Dresden, fog, a minor bump, not even necessary to fix the bodywork, plus the fact that it’s the Englishman’s car, I say to the minder if you must you can put it in your report tomorrow, but now it’s bedtime.

  But the guy won’t let it drop, ‘Telefon, Telefon’, he spots a light, a kind of Weinstube, very glaucous, when we go inside we realise our kraut is white as a sheet, he asks for the number of the police station, he’s shaking, then the Englishman – a big noise in the British Party – takes the phone, he has seen the greasy smears on the mouthpiece, he takes it all the same, dials the number, talks to the cops, just a scratch, just the paintwork, not worth bothering with, you know what the reply was? At the other end, someone said, ‘Yes, we already know.’

  Max took Hans by the shoulders, Hans, it’s the land where everything is already known, if you go either you’ll blow your brains out inside two weeks or you’ll become like them, you really think ‘knowing everything already’ is worth it?

  When Lilstein and Kappler meet shortly in the Konditorei, Kappler will definitely see Lilstein coming, he knows everything, Lilstein won’t be able to keep anything from him, they’ll resume their conversation at the point where they’d left it in this selfsame place twenty-seven years ago, Kappler is the only man with whom Lilstein can speak in a different way, because Kappler remembers. From the very first minute they are together again Kappler will be confronted by two Lilsteins, not the adolescent and the adult but two adults, the adult that Lilstein has constructed and the adult Kappler will identify, the one who took over from the adolescent, the one the other Lilstein has suppressed, no, camouflaged, the one who goes on thinking filthy swine when faced by his Interior Minister, or moron when confronted by an article by Suslov. Actually, it’s the best part of Lilstein, the part which still knows what a Minister is and what a Suslov is worth.

  Or else this best part which is camouflaged not suppressed is dialectical, as they say, it allows the other part to exist and act, the part that lets Lilstein say ‘close the file’ as he holds out a list of three names to a subordinate, he can behave like a bastard because he knows that at any time, without much mental effort, he can reconnect with Lilstein the good, the clear-headed, the Lilstein who wants the good and the true, the one who rereads What Is Englightenment? and has the moral law inside him.

  Perhaps those two Lilsteins are as nothing beside a third, older than both of them, who goes back a long way, further even than the adolescent, the one Kappler had sensed, he of the rebellious gesture, who from the start had always thought get lost the lot of you, as when he was small, he’d tried to repair his toy car, he’d taken the mechanism to pieces, then it didn’t work at all, and he’d thrown the whole mess to the far end of the room shouting:

  ‘Bugger and piss and shit!’
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  And he’d got a good hiding, because his father and mother and all their guests had heard him, despite the distance separating the drawing room from his nursery room.

  ‘Bugger and piss and shit!’

  It seems a pretty inventive verbal construct to him whenever he thinks about it, it was also a pretty good hiding, a father and a mother both eminent doctors with left-wing leanings, extreme left-wing, a damn good hiding, because such behaviour, such swearing, it’s unacceptable, it’s fascist, he’d taken a larruping from a belt, no not a belt but the dog’s braided leash, to beat the fascism out of him, and he’d lost for good two small components of the clockwork car he’d taken apart, a sophisticated piece of clockwork it was, with two settings, the first made the car turn in a wide circle, the second made it do figures-of-eight, you wound the spring up with a hollow key which looked like a uniformed chauffeur, a real gem, fantastic outings, hotels like hotels are in dreams, in one of his dreams it was a limousine chrome-plated all over and he parked it outside the Adlon Hotel, but the car had had it.

  Lilstein has no idea what became of that car, he drew a small lesson from the episode, became very meticulous when mending things, he soon learned how to put any clockwork car back together again, he can open the backs of watches and take apart lighters, musical-boxes, pens, locks, taps, Bunsen burners, telephones too, though that’s not very interesting, but he can put them together again and often manages to mend them, there’s a screw missing from the gramophone belonging to the camp guards, the one that immobilises the drive unit which prevents it moving when the spring is being wound up, he uses a nail instead held by a match splinter inserted into the hole, he remembers seeing a nail that very morning, just the right size, a nail not serving any purpose, in another barrack block, he asked permission, a real gift for make do and mend, he can work out the way things are designed, he doesn’t need to use force to open the back of things, not watchmaker’s hands exactly, but very clever even down to the nail of his right thumb which he uses as a small screwdriver, a handyman, in Buchenwald they spared Lilstein the most gruelling jobs, and there was always an extra piece of bread for him.