Waltenberg

  ‘Childhood, young gentleman of France, does not interest you, not yet. Have you read Trakl, Georg Trakl? No? “Grodek”, a war poem, written in 1914, captures the whole of the gangrene in a few lines, and at the end the poem becomes still and passes the baton to children against a background of golden leaves on a field of midnight black, the children who will be born and grow big, and Trakl dies and it’s the war that grows big, our entire world was born in 1914, I was born in 1914.

  ‘What did I put across the general? Don’t you want me to tell you any more about my mother? Afraid you’ll lose the thread? I’m very fond of digressions, still, too bad, I’m in Rosmar in 1947 with the general, I’ve reconstructed the adults and the kids I’ve turned into “Pioneers”, quite delightful, the Internationale sung by corncrake voices along country lanes just before harvest-home, children returning with their little baskets full of poppies, a few wheat stalks, berries red and blue, and in town there were no more beggars on the streets.

  ‘What? There weren’t under Hitler either? That’s not funny, I had no idea you’d sunk so low, you’re being provocative, I’m not against it, and you wouldn’t be wrong, factually, no more beggars, but I persist in believing that it wasn’t the same, and so do you, of course. You know what the law was called that gave Hitler full powers to act, I know all about it, when the wonderful German elite went over wholesale to him, it was “the law for the elimination of poverty”, how had this poverty come about? I’m getting back to the point, digression is my besetting sin, with my general in 1947 I digressed, I digressed for nights on end, I digressed with the aid of vodka and Kummel and one day I wrote a report, in it I said that the general was too fond of the army.’

  Again Lilstein cuts a morsel of tart, raises it to his mouth, slowly, turning his dessert fork around to examine it, he tastes it, then sets about his portion in earnest. You do the same. The tart crumbles easily when bit, the shortcrust is firm in your mouth but also yielding, it breaks up and scatters amid the taste of apple and raspberry. Lilstein looks at you:

  ‘You’ve tasted it before? Wasn’t as good? You know, the secret of good shortcrust pastry is to take your time, don’t go at it with too much vim, it must be left to prove for at least three hours, and you too, you must allow as long as it takes, I don’t want you to get all tensed up, people who live in a state of anxiety make bad workmen, you must be the absolute master of your own rhythm, no emergency stations, that’s what ruins the whole damn shoot, you really like this Linzer Tone? It’s very delicate, hand movements precise but never vehement, the proprietor’s wife does it without thinking, that’s why she always succeeds.

  ‘If you’re heavy-handed your shortcrust goes rubbery, don’t let the egg yolk be absorbed by the flour, it must first be beaten into the icing sugar, mix the flour and butter together lightly, ensuring that the flour is thoroughly coated in the butter to prevent it sticking, make a well in the middle for the egg yolks and add a mixture of sugar and vanilla, then you mix them together in the well with the tips of your fingers, lightly, like a cat’s paw playing… Do you like Waltenberg, the French people I ask usually answer “The Swiss Alps! Ah, Thomas Mann, those were the days!” But do you know what else happened here, in 1929, the year you were born?

  ‘The Waltenberg European Seminar? Great thinkers, philosophers, writers, politicians, industrialists, economists, beautiful women, a week on a tall mountain, great debates, seminars within the Seminar, economists at each other’s throats over the question of value, fiercest were the ones who talked about hot cakes, they sickened me, value was not work but what they called marginal value, the price of bread when you’re not hungry, and then there were the philosophers, a great philosophical tug-of-war between what bourgeois Europe had taken centuries to develop, the ideal of forms, the operation of rules, and, in the red corner opposite, a philosophy of Being, the notion of Being-in-the-World, which called for forms, rules and irony to be consigned to oblivion, while the participants stuffed themselves with chocolate creams, delicacies of the nouveaux riches, and tasteless, I personally have always been on the side of the Enlightenment.’

  You can agree with Lilstein about the lure of the chocolate cream yet find it amusing that a communist should take up cudgels on behalf of the bourgeoisie of the Enlightenment, you might even smile a sceptical smile, but that doesn’t stop Lilstein droning on about the Waltenberg European Seminar, Regel, Merken, Maynes, 1929, the fur that flew.

  ‘Really? You never heard about it? But the French were there, there was a Madame de Valréas who financed the whole thing, gnarled hands, lips often dark red, violet eyes, very efficient, people said “the Waltenberg Seminar” or “the Valréas Conference”, present also were Europe’s lunatics, Wolkenhove, Van Ryssel of the steelworks, and Moncel, the great Christian metaphysician who is mad about theatre.

  ‘He was young at the time, not as young as me, but a tyro, clenched, very reactionary, much more so than he is today, the philosophers asked one question, what was to be done about Kant’s legacy ten years after the butchery in the trenches? “Dare to think”, a small self-sufficient world of thinkers and writers, Hans Kappler, Edouard Palude, and politicians, Briand was there, it was the time of his “away with the cannon, away with the machine guns” and the United States of Europe, and scientists, wonderful lectures on the theory of relativity, the whole of Europe, the economists drew blood as they argued about the theory of value and their talk of hot cakes, in the end everything clashed, mingled, a whole world, along with the wives, the children, the mistresses, the catamites, they also knew how to have a good time, some went at it enthusiastically, and on occasions there were the imprints of knees in the snow.

  ‘The coats of the women were fawn, grey, black, the hems, collars and cuffs trimmed with magnificent soft white fur, I found them very arousing, they wore small hats, and the men carried tomes bristling with bookmarks, between them in the space of a few days they redrew the intellectual map and reconfigured their wonderful Europe while they strolled, really major confrontations!

  ‘And as usual behind the war of ideas lay questions of jobs, the presidencies of learned societies, arguments about finance and reputation, the sort of thing that drives the frailer brethren mad, and that’s not reckoning with what was going on behind the scenes, in the streets of Germany, there was even one of the leading participants who had a manic outburst, a man who rushed into the hotel lounge shouting, “Infamy, infamy!” like something out of King Lear, there were also snowball fights, I was there with my brother, I was just sixteen, my brother had brought me, it was supposed to be good for my lungs, any excuse was enough for a snowball fight, I slipped, a woman was chasing me, she fell on top of me, I’ve been about a bit since then but I can still recall her breath on my neck, my brother was keen on the new philosophy, like many good people who “dared to think”, not knowing that they were baring their throats for the dogs.’

  Outside the window, the jackdaw was still visible and holding his own against the wind, suddenly he wheels on his right wing, rocks and dives, Lilstein closes his eyes as he chews a mouthful of tart:

  ‘She’s put something else in it, she’s changed the recipe today, what can you smell, over the raspberry, apple, butter, vanilla and cinnamon? Something else, try hard, trust yourself, say what’s this on my tongue, ah yes, rum, a very good rum, you know what that back taste of rum means? No? What happened to the Russian general after I submitted my report? Are you really that fond of the army? Wouldn’t you prefer to know the secret of the presence of rum in the Linzer, or a brief philosophical interlude or the story of my mother? The general first? Very well!

  ‘The general disappeared, perhaps just as he walked round a bend in a corridor, they’ll explain all that to you one day, the Russians sent another general, a hero of the Soviet Union, twice a hero of the Soviet Union, but this time he was the one nearly wetting his pants in my presence, he’d been at Stalingrad, panzers with hand grenades, he told me he would have attacked them with his b
are hands if he’d had to, in the end the guy saw off the Reich’s divisions, temperatures of twenty below, he faced me, a low-grade informer, and nearly wet himself, we became firm friends.’

  Why is Lilstein saying all this? these are secrets and you shouldn’t tell secrets unless you are about to trade them for other secrets, but Lilstein has got into his stride, he says that after the business with the first general he hadn’t felt any the better for it, to be perfectly honest, at the time he even considered taking French leave, as they say in England, some of his friends had managed to get away from Rosmar in ’46.

  ‘Once across the border, they stuck skull-caps on their heads and killed the language of the people who had killed them, they left, young gentleman of France, so that they might become strong once more, by moving rocks around for Ben Gurion, a new Sparta, they succeeded, nobody will ever make them disappear again, why didn’t I leave? Because I can’t stand the heat nor the Middle East, nor messianic missions, not messianic missions of any kind, you’ll see, I’ve become very pragmatic, the Red Dawn, Promised Lands, that sort of thing is so mortiferous, personally I prefer fog, quiet brasseries, boring newspapers, waitresses with long legs, a world without God, and internationalism, but above all I love my mother tongue, I am an internationalist infatuated with his mother tongue.’

  Lilstein can’t stand the Middle East but it’s just like being in the Middle East, the talk will go on for hours touching on every subject but carpets, and it will categorically not be about money, in the window no more jackdaws are visible, lower down the mountain isolated chalets can be seen, you imagine another life: the stone sill at the door, at dusk a last cloud over the tree-line, and the hearth, all the resources of the mountain coming benignly together, the gurgle of a brook beneath the snow, a woman in a large woolly jumper, you need silence, Lilstein has caught your eye as it wanders towards the woman with red hair who is now unhurriedly busying herself in the room, he asks you if you think she’s beautiful, yes, at first Lilstein also wanted to kill the language of the people who had killed him, he stayed in Germany but he never spoke German except to give orders:

  ‘I used to joke in Russian, you have to!’

  And as a precaution, Lilstein pretended to have forgotten his French and English, whereas he knows kilometres of poems in several languages, that means he can drive a thousand kilometres reciting poems non-stop or as good as, Shakespeare, Valéry, Baudelaire, Donne, Mandelstam, in particular he knows reams of Goethe, Heine, Rilke and Apollinaire, he’d almost killed all that off too, and then one day a book came his way which he had to read for professional reasons.

  ‘Some bastard bourgeois scribbler! Listen, this too I know by heart, “German will remain the language of my mind, because I am a Jew, I intend to hold on to all that’s left within me of a devastated country” that’s good … “the fate of its sons is also my fate but I bring an additional legacy”, that is generous, it’s humanist! “I bring!” Now mark well the end: “I want to help the world to feel grateful to them for something”, a double distillation, the catch in the back of the throat, if I were a great, strong Aryan, nothing would make me feel more humiliated than that sort of irony.’

  So Lilstein decided he would stay, that he would help, he stayed with them, that is, he stayed at home.

  At the time he read that forbidden author in bed at night, he would lie on one side with, against his back, a beautiful woman.

  ‘It’s wonderful, young comrade, no, too irritating, I can’t go on saying comrade, you’re about to leave the Party, it’s wonderful to read a good book and feel against your back the breasts and legs of a woman who holds you close, her face was sweet and there were the rings of pleasure under her eyes, I did all I could to protect her, she loved me, she whispered in my ear that I took her to unbelievable depths.

  ‘We liked walking along the beach, she denounced me in 1951, just then it wasn’t a very good idea to be called Lilstein or Meyer, I could stroke her breasts for hours on end, I brought her bunches of irises, and she denounced me, or rather she signed a paper in which she said that I had said this and that and so on.

  ‘In the Nazi camps I’d seen comrades die who could have obtained a stay of execution by denouncing me, and lo! my very first real woman managed to betray me! Unbelievable depths indeed!

  ‘They hadn’t even threatened her, they’d asked her questions, they’d dictated her replies, courtroom, men in uniforms, she was a good German citizen, she signed, I discovered everything together, love, Realpolitik, and vaginal follies, to me there are only follies, she denounced me, funny isn’t it? I shed hot tears, but I had done some denouncing too, a general in the Red Army, but I wasn’t sleeping with him at unbelievable depths, and the man who later asked me over and over to denounce myself while he kept turning the endless screw could easily have been one of the group who liberated me from Auschwitz where I hadn’t been denounced, I really thought my number was up, do you know how people died in those times?

  ‘Pneumonia, obviously, but you also got killed, young gentleman of France, from behind, as you walked along a corridor, never attempt to turn round, otherwise the bullet will shatter the bones in your face and then you can’t be made presentable for the coffin, everyone wants to be present at their own death and they mess it up, you understand, the time I felt most scared was when I was in the corridor, I only breathed again when I got to the interrogation room, you have to do it, what saved me was the death of the Big Man with the moustache which also happened just in time to save the lives of his Jewish doctors from a walk down the corridor, I was much less frightened than they were, I soon realised that for reasons I couldn’t understand they weren’t going to kill me, they sent me to a camp, then the death of the Big Man with the moustache meant that I was released from one of those camps no one talks about.’

  Sure, Lilstein saw the girl again, not very long ago, she came to see him in his big office in Berlin.

  ‘I didn’t feel I had anything to forgive her for, I said it wasn’t anything to do with her, the investigation had been fixed from the start, and it’s always better to be denounced by someone who knows you, there are fewer inconsistencies in the record, and therefore fewer beatings. It is a sweet feeling, having an ex-lover there in front of you torn between fear and remorse, it’s a moment you’ve dreamed of a thousand times and when it happens you sit there and look, ten years on, the woman has not changed much, she is beautiful, deep breaths make her breasts rise, your hands remember her breasts, it’s a very delicious position to be in, but you tell yourself you could have done without the circumstances which have brought it about, and that makes you change your mind as you watch the woman with such feeling.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure you wouldn’t care for a spot of philosophy, young man? I mean to say: Waltenberg! The famous Seminar, the intelligentsia of Europe reading the last rites over Aufklärung, such a rich word, and in its place proclaiming that we must inhabit the world poetically, go back to the earth, to the Urwald, to the great forest of Authentic Being, while the brownshirts were beginning to occupy the hearts of cities! The earth which does not lie, the forest tall with trees! Still, it was bound to get out, that in the end the tall trees always march in step with the warriors, across the earth that never lies. I was young, the people I loved called me young Lilstein, I liked that, I was sixteen in 1929, I had an older brother who was a philosopher and wanted me to understand it all, very taken he was with the new thought, that is the philosophy of Being, away with your concepts and your Enlightenment! In 1934, the Nazis grabbed him by the hair and beat his head against a kerbstone.

  ‘Ten times or so, that was enough, "erst wenn sie steht, die Uhr … it’s only when the clock stops, im Pendelschlag des hin und her… between the swings of its pendulum, hörst Du, that you hear", the clock’s a lovely touch! “sie geht, und ging und geht nicht mehr … that it’s going, was going, has stopped going, never heard that before? It was said by Merken, the great philosopher of Being, the victor of Waltenb
erg, a poem he dedicated after the war to his friend René Char, one of the very few genuine writers in the Resistance, Malraux of course was another, weapons at the ready, yes, Malraux was a bit later but he knew what strong links were, knew the best moment to forge strong links, you know, I always had a liking for Malraux, from time to time I discuss him with Hatzfeld, with old friends. Anyway, Merken dedicated these lines to his friend Char, a swing of the pendulum.

  ‘Merken and Char, there’s a magnificent photo, the two men walking along a forest path, taken from the back, they’re walking side by side, Merken is short, Char is big and beefy, it’s very moving, you really don’t want to hear the rest? No philosophy? No poetry? My surprise when I saw the photo of these two men together, knowing what had happened to Merken after the Nazis took over? Later perhaps?

  ‘Well shall we talk about the woman who brought all that splendid company together here at the Waldhaus? Madame de Valréas, French, an aristocrat, early forties, with a quite splendid derrière, you know, “the royal rear-guard when amorous battle is joined”, no? You’re so good at saying no, fair enough, I’m not here to put any sort of temptation in your way, not even Madame de Valréas’s derrière which has changed significantly since those days, with or without the help of Verlaine, stick to serious matters, won’t you try a glass of white wine with it? sure? Not even the story of my mother? Later?

  ‘And you really wish to part company with your idealism? You don’t care for my two-soul scheme? Turns your stomach? I can understand that, all those dead workers, that’s right, workers, we’re not going to start telling each other in full view of the Rikshorn that the Americans parachuted a hundred thousand imperialists into Budapest in one night, let’s leave all that to the virgins, the eunuchs and our popular democratic press.’