Waltenberg

  ‘We shall combat the religion of war. Take us separately and we are sorry specimens, you, the man who is sick of action, and I, the apparatchik with no dreams, we’re pathetic, but together we could make one very interesting person, a conciliator, a reconciler, a regulator, and there will even be moments when we can laugh, yes, laugh.

  ‘In our line of business people laugh a lot, six months ago one of my colleagues in Africa, in a brand-new country, one Sunday morning, the whole day is devoted to voluntary farm service, he was a Special Envoy for Cultural Relations. The Africans put him in a field, with an American, also a very important person, a Special Envoy for Economic Affairs, crewcut, with a cap of some sort on the back of his head, their job is to get rid of all the weeds in their field, so he and the American set to work, the two specialists, you know the song, it was a hit for a popular singer, left-wing, one of yours, “You only gotter bend a bit but that’s the ’ardest part of it”.

  ‘By the end of the day, they’re exhausted but happy, and friends almost, reconciled by manual work, the Minister for Internal and External Security of the host country comes and stands between the American and my friend for the photo, smiles all round, “A fine example of collaboration,” he tells journalists, “and that, for our country together with our brothers in the East and the West, is our third way!” And then, in a whisper but still sporting his smile, he says to both of them out of the corner of his mouth: “You pulled up all the manioc.”

  ‘The story I promised you? No, that’s not it, be patient, I really want to tell it to you.’

  A woman walks quietly into the lounge, tall, red hair, ample movements, a midnight-blue linen dress, step springy and rhythmic, like a dancer’s, very calm expression, she rootles for something in one of the cabinets then leaves.

  ‘It’s a story I’ve never told anyone, so I need a warm-up. So you’re from Paris, sent by Roland Hatzfeld? That’s right, he told me himself, is he still living in that little place near the Porte des Lilas? Not interested? You don’t know? Good old Roland, still a man of sound habits, did you know that Malraux almost got him to join the Party? You didn’t? You don’t believe me? You do? See, you are interested after all, there was this public meeting in 1934, ’35, yes indeed, those were very intense times.

  ‘Hatzfeld turns up to hear Malraux, Salle Playel it was or maybe some other venue, the writer is just back from the USSR, a fast-flowing impassioned speech, it really was, that lock of hair falling across his forehead, the struggle against fascism, voice breaking dramatically and much gesturing with his hands, Malraux is being effective, “in the USSR,” he declaims, “democracy is guaranteed by the fact the workers march with rifles on their shoulders”, Roland Hatzfeld stands up, applauds wildly, the whole audience applauds wildly, and he decides that the very next day he will apply for a Communist Party card, he’d just finished his law degree, he’d pleaded well, people were already predicting he’d make a great advocate one day. At Party HQ, some sensible people told him he didn’t need to have a card, that he’d be more useful remaining on the outside, but if he really wanted a card they would give him one as discreetly as he could wish, they probably didn’t say “discreetly”, most likely they said “privately”, on a personal basis, it all went off very well.

  ‘Why am I telling you this? To get you used to trusting me, though maybe that’s not true, that said, Hatzfeld phoned me, it’s not something he does often, it seems you’re not going down well, Budapest, that report on Stalin’s crimes, the rest of it, Hatzfeld advised me to offer you something you would embrace with passion.’

  Chapter 4

  1956

  The Childhood of a Mole

  In which you are invited by a friend of Michael Lilstein to eat lobster in a Paris brasserie.

  In which you descend a considerable way into the bowels of the Gare de l’Est.

  In which you meet a beautiful woman dressed in red in a first-class railway compartment.

  In which Lilstein tells you why you should work with him.

  Paris/Waltenberg, early December 1956

  Every soul is a secret society unto itself.

  Marcel Jouhandeau, Algèbre des valeurs morales

  In Paris, a few days before your departure for Waltenberg, the Waldhaus and this conversation with Lilstein, Roland Hatzfeld had told you:

  ‘You’ve been in the Party for more than ten years now, young man, it’s time you thought of tackling more complex matters.’

  He’d talked to you about Lilstein in a very odd sort of way, ‘a victim of the Nazis and Stalin, but he never gave them anything, not Stalin, not the Nazis, and he’s stayed up to his elbows in the slime of praxis, it would be useful for you to meet him.’

  Up to his elbows, slime, a weighty image, and Hatzfeld had made it weightier by attaching ‘praxis’, but he’d opened his eyes wide as he said it, lifting his forefinger to a point halfway up his plump pink cheeks, articulating each word separately, smiling faintly, as if making a point of marking his distance from the obligatory language of the Party.

  But he had taken care not to make this distance too obvious, the smile which was not a jibe, more a sign that no one was taken in by the minutiae of a ritual to which a man could remain attached even so, because it was a ritual which allowed people to acknowledge each other, people whom society refused to acknowledge. This conversation had taken place over a platter of sea-food in a brasserie near the Madeleine, wood panels, red leather, large lampshades, a great deal of brass, the men who came in had fat bellies, the women wore fox tippets or similar around their necks, both waiters and head waiters were got up like penguins, the maître d’hôtel was in evening dress: the slime of praxis.

  ‘Don’t sulk,’ Hatzfeld had said. ‘Makes you look like a puritan, puritans never do good work. Eat up, you’re not thirty yet, you have your whole life in front of you, so don’t behave like someone who doesn’t know what to do with the claw of a lobster.’

  At the end of the meal, Roland Hatzfeld had given you a return train ticket for Waltenberg, first class.

  ‘It’s partly to teach you to combat puritanism, but also because customs aren’t as much of a nuisance with first-class passengers, but no sleeper, you travel by day, that means you won’t meet the Madonna of the Sleeping-Cars, but it’ll save us money. If the trip turns out to be a waste of time, you’ll have had a short holiday, and you can pay me back if you like, but you’re not obliged to.’

  After leaving the restaurant, you went on talking as you walked with Hatzfeld towards the Place de la Bourse, a friendly stroll, you were flattered, you know he was part of a resistance network during the war, he was one of its leaders, they told you the day the network was blown Hatzfeld deliberately allowed himself to be captured, passing himself off as a simple messenger to point the Gestapo in the wrong direction, he was sent to Buchenwald. As you strolled along the Boulevard des Capucines, an almost tender note crept into Hatzfeld’s voice.

  He talked about struggle, never give up the struggle, stay on the side of life, currently he is defending a Frenchman facing charges of aiding the NLF who may very well be guillotined.

  ‘I’ve been to see Coty, about a pardon, he said nothing but he told me a story, in 1917 he was present at the execution of a soldier who had refused to go up the line. To comfort the man, a general told him affectionately, “You’re dying for France, my boy.” ’

  Roland Hatzfeld also spoke about what he called the Great Mess, he gestured to a front page of Paris-Presse in the window of a newspaper kiosk, ‘In the Hell that is Budapest’. You went pish! … to show that you wouldn’t go that far, Hatzfeld told you that people shouldn’t tell each other tales.

  ‘Overall, you know, the bourgeois press is right, that’s really what has happened, there are also barbed crosses, Horthyites, the return of the Whites, but it was the people that rebelled, sometimes I get so sick of it all… Go and see Lilstein and even if he fails to convince you, come back and tell me what he said, because I need to know. In
1930 I travelled from Berlin to Moscow by rail, it was interminable, a coach full of young people, Prussia, the Polish steppe, at one moment we passed under a triumphal arch made of wood, plain and simple.

  ‘In the corridor of the train, a young German actress started singing the Internationale as she looked out at the landscape, I was happy, you should never be happy, today I no longer know what I should be doing. In 1949, in Paris, in court, I faced another woman, a German revolutionary, Katrin Bernheim, she’d fled to Moscow after Hitler came to power, she said that in 1936 she had been held in a camp in the USSR, at Karaganda; she called it a concentration camp, and she also said that in 1940 Stalin had handed her back to the Nazis who had sent her to Ravensbrück, you know what I did? I made a case showing that she herself had demanded to be returned to Germany, I was quite sure of what I was saying, she was a turncoat.

  ‘Then one day, in 1954, Lilstein told me about the camp where he’d been held, we were just walking in Berlin, anywhere, an avenue, not the Stalinallee, that would have been too rich, but it was thereabouts, it was a sobering story, what they did to him, what he had seen being done to others, for two years he was in camp in Siberia, the two years that preceded Stalin’s death, and the last months in particular, when he realised that things were getting tougher and tougher, until then he’d felt that the powers which had arrested him nevertheless wanted to go easy on him, but there came a moment when he realised that he was going to die, he told me that Siberia wasn’t like Auschwitz, there was no Selektionslager for the kids, women, the sick, but from that moment on as far as he was concerned there was the same feel about things as at Auschwitz, he knew he would die during the coming month, he no longer tried to keep his head down, he took all the beatings, at Auschwitz he was saved by Stalin’s troops, in Siberia it was Stalin’s death, when Beria ordered the camps to be opened. Lilstein told me that, kept it very low key.

  ‘All that was part of the information I needed, the turncoat Bernheim had been right, I made a mental note, but it was only a month later that I thought about her and what she’d said about the camps, I could tell you about breaking out in a cold sweat as I slept, recurring nightmares featuring female apparitions, about how memory takes its revenge at night, but it didn’t happen that way, one day she simply came into my mind and ever since she has been part of my thinking, a great lady, she said Ravensbrück was cleaner and warmer than Karaganda, the Russians worked the prisoners to death by feeding them next to nothing, when they didn’t fulfil the fixed work-quota their rations were halved, at Ravensbrück the food was better but prisoners died of the beatings they got, the guards were sadists, they were there to exterminate, the Russians were decent, scrupulous, they simply applied their system.

  ‘She thought Karaganda was worse than Ravensbrück, Lilstein didn’t grade them, I was only at Buchenwald, no one was gassed there, it was inside the Reich’s own territory, gas was for the camps situated more to the east but all the same Buchenwald was hell, Nazi power with a hell all of its own, not the kind of hell to be used as a threat for the after-life, no, a hell in the here-and-now, a few hours away in a train from Berlin, and she said that Karaganda was worse, and the worst is that perhaps she was right, sometimes I get sick of it all … but can you really see us standing shoulder to shoulder with those bastards, while children are dying in Algeria?’

  Hatzfeld motioned towards another newspaper with the headline: ‘Our Flags Still Fly Over Port Said’.

  By now you’d got as far as the Bourse, Hatzfeld stopped and looked at you:

  ‘Never let virtue strangle virtue, make the trip, you can decide once you know the facts, leave the Party, don’t leave the Party, whatever. Go on, it’s a birthday present, your twenty-seventh, and your tenth as a Party member.’

  Before taking your leave of Hatzfeld you asked him where he’d met Lilstein, he stared up at the front of the Bourse as he gave you his answer:

  ‘In a very smart place, a real debating club.’

  ‘More specifically?’

  Hatzfeld went into an English accent:

  ‘In Buchenwald, in the latrines, a short while before they sent Lilstein to Auschwitz.’

  Two days later, you went to the Gare de l’Est and caught the train, you got there with bags of time to spare, and just before you walked into the main concourse you gave yourself a moment to contemplate the huge picture by Herter which shows the departure of the soldiers for the war in 1914, contemplate is hardly the word, a daub, metre after metre, of grim-faced women, resolute men, it was painted in 1926, flowers, not so much enthusiasm as duty, there is something unintentional about the picture which for all its faults wins you over, in the centre of the composition, standing on the steps of a carriage, facing you, is a man holding his arms out wide and angled heavenwards, a bouquet in his left hand, a rifle in his right, with flowers in the spout of the gun, light shirt, eyes turned upward, towards Country and Values, and at the same time this man in the shirt, with his arms stretched out wide makes you think inevitably of Goya’s condemned man, the man in the Très de mayo, the civilian shot by a firing-squad of Napoleon’s soldiers.

  The war has not yet begun in the painting in the Gare de l’Est but that soldier in 1914 already has the look of a man condemned to death by firing-squad. With one difference: here, there is no firing-squad, the killers are out of the frame, they might be Prussians or whoever gave the order to go up against the Prussians, or again the killer could come from the heaven the man is looking at, it’s not what Herter intended, but don’t linger here, you know what you’ve got to do, you came early for a purpose, opposite the end of platform 1 is a small door, nothing remarkable about it, between two union posters, no sign on the door, it’s closed, entry is restricted as you know, you wait discreetly until another man comes along and opens it with his key and then you slip in behind him as if you’d arrived at the same moment he did.

  You find yourself in a corridor, you slow down to let the man get ahead of you, stairs lead up towards the administrative offices, you go up them, the steps are protected by a new floor covering called ‘linoleum’, this isn’t the place, from the landing extends a line of offices, the corridor looks new, this isn’t it, the last time you were here everything looked much shabbier, you’ve come to the wrong floor, you’re about to be asked what damn business you have being here, you go back down the stairs, door on the left, corridor, you turn right, narrow staircase, you’ve never been down these steps, you are getting lost, but it’s not that difficult in this bloody place, you are lost.

  You’re wasting time, you take the stairs which descend into the bowels of the station, now the steps are bare boards, a smell of old dust, you pass a man carrying a small case, another anonymous door at the foot of the stairs, a corridor, you’re lost again, at this rate you’ll miss your train, you must go back upstairs, you can’t even find the stairs that will take you back up, this is stupid, and no chance of asking the way because you’d be challenged to say what you’re doing here, you’re going to be late, you don’t trust your watch, you pass another man, he’s got a small case too, it’s cold, a door that creaks, the man had come out of it.

  You’re on the wrong track, you’re lost, no, the smell, machine oil and hot dust, the smell particular to the contact of electricity with dust, you go through the door, on the left is a kind of lodge or records office, a woman sits inside, she doesn’t give you a second glance, she is fully occupied with her index cards, the next room looks like a library, many tomes, glass-fronted bookcases, archives, the room is empty, it is very early, and then at the far end a door, above the door is an electric clock, at last you’ve arrived, you’re not late, you may go in, people greet you though they don’t know you, it’s the way they do things here, you acknowledge the nodding heads with gestures which are more expansive, very deferential, you’re the youngest person in the room.

  It is a very large room, with a magnificent model railway layout on a raised dais a metre and a half from the ground, it occupies
almost the whole floor space, despite the early hour men are going briskly about their business, each one has come with his own train in a small case, not many trains are running round the circuit, one of them has problems – I’ve got sixteen volts and the ammeter’s showing zero – see what he wants, he’ll get irritated, he acts like a kid, one man picks up a steam engine, it’s not working, pound to a penny it’s the brushes, no, it worked perfectly for me at home, it’s the track that’s the problem, it’s not the track, look, Henri’s Blue train has been running for an hour, if it isn’t the brushes I don’t see what it could be, a long goods train rattles along the rails and heads for a tunnel under a papier-mâché mountain.

  As it re-emerges the train passes a half-built village, stops at the points, sets off again, many locomotives are lying on their sides, with their engine covers off, undergoing repairs or being tuned, a man in a Breton sailor’s cap is re-winding an electric motor, another is feeding a bundle of thin wires into the coaches of his Paris—Hendaye to install night lights, you hear the rata-ta-taat the carriages make on the rails, you widen your gaze to take in the whole network, the Breton or Basque villages, the engine shed with its turntable, the sidings with a water-tower and coal bunker, and the trains go round, the Blue train, then a Michelin railcar, and those new electric engines, the ones christened crocodiles on account of their very long noses.