Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  A provocateur, Lilstein is just a provocateur, but where does he come from? an East German who can pass for Swiss when he wants to, but talks like this, does he believe what he says? He pretends to when he’s talking but surely he can’t believe it, and yet it sounds so right when he says it, is a German capable of telling a lie without believing it? But what else does he believe if he believes what he’s been saying since we’ve been sitting here? In the omelette, in the broken eggs it is made of? Is Lilstein just a plain cop? But why should anyone be sending you to see a cop? Because in Paris you told two or three close friends that some Hungarian demonstrators were true socialists? And that not everything was false in Khrushchev’s report? Or alternatively, is Lilstein a traitor? In which case Roland Hatzfeld has sent you to see a traitor, a traitor who is using his cover as a cop to say what he really thinks of the regime?

  Or a cop who has stayed a cop but who is at least for once getting whatever is bothering him off his chest by playing the role of traitor they’ve told him to play? You can’t get your head around any of this, you don’t know if you should nod agreement at what Lilstein is saying, you rest your chin on your thumb with index and middle fingers aslant your mouth, you mutter sounds which might pass for assent or be taken as indications that you are paying attention, but from time to time you take your hand away from your cheek.

  When you do this you uncover your mouth which is half open, a sign of denial, then you revert to your pose as Lilstein’s docile audience, you’re on your best behaviour, nor do you allow yourself to bite off bits of skin around your fingernails, sometimes you press your index finger into your cheek and hold it from the inside between your teeth, picking gently at the skin, taking care not to draw blood, Lilstein could also be a real traitor to the Party, a traitor in the pay of the English, so were you sent to see him by mistake or was it to cook a Frenchman’s goose? A British Intelligence Service ploy? And why does the idea of being with an enemy of the Party you are intent on quitting make you feel sick to the stomach? No, Lilstein is a politician, a peevish communist but a real communist for all that, so why did you agree to come here to meet him if you are so keen to leave the Party?

  ‘And so, young gentleman of France, the Red Army has just killed workers, including women workers, who were members of the Hungarian Communist Party, fact, it also killed fascists who were killing communists, not many fascists, they got out fast to Austria and Germany before the tanks came back into the city, it was the working-class suburbs which held out longest, all of which raises some very awkward questions for you, and because you have also read extracts from a “report attributed to comrade Khrushchev” in the bourgeois press, you are now thinking of resigning from the Party, of turning your card in, as they say.

  ‘Why? to restore your innocence? to make yourself believe again? Your father would be overjoyed, don’t get angry, don’t get up, spare me the dramatic gestures, I never found it very helpful being the son of a heroine of the resistance and I suspect it can’t be easy to have a father who was a Pétainist and a collaborator, that may put me ahead morally but at least your father is still alive, stripped of his French nationality but alive, he plays boules in Barcelona, he’s good at it, he lives in the Barrio Chino, am I correct? odd sort of exile for an ex-Vichy stalwart, in Franco’s Spain yes, but in a red-light area of town, Work, Family, Pimmel.

  ‘Pimmel?. In German it means willy, all right, I didn’t want to be coarse, I apologise, but don’t be so combustible, sit down, my mother fought against Trotsky, she fought against him but she’d known him, the Party gave her a splendid funeral, in the photos there was not a single person of her generation left, I thanked the Party, our fragile organisations need grateful, gullible followers, who live longer, does it make you wince to be told all this? Learn to take life easier, I’ve been around, been around too much, seen too much History, you want some of mine? Leave the Party? The Party doesn’t give a shit! There are hundreds, thousands of people ready to worship at the feet of the idol believing that they are thinking dialectically, but if you still have any ideas and ideals left, and if you want to fight for them, you’re going to have to learn to stop being the kid who answers back.’

  Lilstein looks at you, you hold his gaze and tell yourself that the Waldhaus is a trap, they can denounce you now whenever they want to, in Paris Hatzfeld said this trip would be like the journey to Zimmerwald, in 1917, in the middle of the war, when French pacifists travelled to meet their German and Russian comrades, but Lilstein is no pacifist, he’s a stirrer, you look towards the dining room, empty, you look out at the Rikshorn, at Waltenberg down the mountainside, a small drowsy village, the boules, they know everything, what is your role in the drama, what audience are you performing to? the son of a French collaborator who is plotting in Switzerland with someone big in the Stasi? or the member of the editorial board of La Nouvelle Pensée who is having talks with a double agent of the Intelligence Service, less than a month after having discussions with a deputy member of the Politburo of the French Communist Party? Which newspaper, and on which side, will run the story first?

  All you can do now is hand back your card, Lilstein has just one more thing to ask you, a small thing, and then he will let you depart in peace:

  ‘Why did you join the Party which you now seem so anxious to leave? Didn’t you know that the Party had done some terrible things long before this latest business in Budapest? In Berlin, not that long ago? In 1936, the show trials? And the “kulaks taken as a class”, were they just a handful of parasites in evening dress as portrayed in some Eisenstein film? Or Cronstadt, a workers’ council, like the one in Budapest, but you must know what the Soviets have always made of workers’ councils, and the Lumpen, there are various books about it, are you an intellectual or a grand Lady Bountiful from some charitable organisation? Do you know by what means, as recently as three years ago, convicted persons were still leaving Moscow for camps – yes, camps – which don’t exist, so it’s hardly surprising that people find it so difficult to come back from them? In bogus refrigerated trucks, there were so many of them roaring through the streets that French journalists wrote glowingly of the abundant supply of butcher’s meat! Fairy stories, the lot of it, one day we’ll come back to them.’

  Lilstein’s eyes look larger now than they did a little while ago, his face less pink, the cheekbones more pronounced, you see more clearly the two inwardly curving lines running down from each nostril to the sides of his mouth, they are the lines that come to people who laugh, who consistently use their faces and expressions as pawns in the conversation, the better to impose on the person they’re talking to.

  A metre behind Lilstein, in the tall dresser, is a collection of decorated plates, mountains, lakes, goose-girls, old châteaux, group scenes, the late evening light floods through the window and warms the porcelain and the colours which decades of washing have turned pinkish, greenish, pastel-ish.

  In the middle of the collection, two rectangular dishes, much bigger than the plates. The one on the left shows women emerging from a house and walking into the foreground in a swirl of snowflakes, severally carrying a lantern, distaff and gun, while in the background a group of men linger by the door holding straps and halters, it is the end of one of those country gatherings at which people would congregate around a ceramic stove and tell stories about the Devil, the lady of the lake or grapes, when the buds swell on the nodes of vine-shoots ravaged by the secateurs, everyone listened, the girls spun and wove their wedding trousseaus, the boys greased the horses’ harness with goose-fat, Lilstein is calmer now, he resumes in a steady voice:

  ‘At least your father is alive, and you’re not obliged to smile nicely for his murderers.’

  Lilstein is going to speak to you at some length, he will mix confidences, philosophy, crude words, the edge of tears, the thoughts of Bukharin, best of the Bolsheviks, the only one capable of coming up with ideas other than the knout and watchtowers, Schubert’s Lieder, ah, you like them too, Fischer-D
iskau, yes, but there’s also Hans Hotter, it’s an English company that distributes the recordings, the state of workers’ pay, more Bukharin, the songs of Yves Montand, I particularly like the early Montand despite his legato, Schubert, I must get you to listen to the Winter Journey sung by a woman, rather unusual and quite magnificent, the death of Beria or rather the seven deaths of Beria, at least seven, in the Bolshoi they’re performing The Decembrists by Yuri Shaporin, it’s 27 June 1953, all the Party chiefs are there, Pravda prints all the names except Beria’s, the approach road to the Bolshoi is closed off by tanks for the limousine bringing the comrade first deputy Prime Minister of the USSR and the Minister for State Security, he is shot in the prison of Lefortovo the same evening, the first of his seven deaths.

  The second is Khrushchev saying ‘One day Beria came to a meeting without a bodyguard and I killed him’, Beria is the most interesting character of that generation, you shall hear all about him, young gentleman of France, Beria as a skirt-chaser, the guy has a reputation for having women brought forcibly in from the street and raping them in his office, over his desk, Bluebeard. When I was in prison I heard some hair-raising stories about him, a very complicated death.

  Then there’s the version by Sergo Beria, his son, ‘my father was killed in his house’ on 26 June.

  Lilstein continues to jumble everything up, he drops the deaths of Beria, before he’s done he’ll tell you about the others, they’re even more lurid, he switches to the atomic threat, comes back to his mother, Berlin, January 1919, she stumbled across the corpse of Rosa Luxemburg, he reverts to the atomic threat, back to Clara Zetkin, then something new, the colonial wars, Schubert’s Lieder and his Winter Journey, I know a woman who used to sing it, marvellous, the story of the hunter and the bear, Beria’s frolickings, his wife saying he had mistresses but not all that many, wouldn’t have had the time, I must make time to tell you the story of the bear and the hunter, young gentleman of France, Picasso’s paintings, I’m a noted expert on Guernica, the horse which turns round is fascinating, a whole story complete in itself, have you read the articles Blunt wrote about it, Anthony Blunt?

  Lilstein raises his glass and begins to talk about a wide beach on the Baltic, you must be able to trust people with secrets, his life had begun again on a beach, everything had begun on a beach, it was 1948, he’d only just met the young woman, and when I think she denounced me!

  He couldn’t say now which of them had suggested the stroll along the shore, the sand and the sea, the desert that was the sea, the spume, the salt, the smell of seaweed, the cry of albatross and petrel, a small, low-roofed house loaned for their picnic, they’d walked for hours, defying the cold wind blowing in off the sea, walked without speaking, the wind stripped them of words, of any desire to speak, losing all sensation except that of a body walking into the wind, a body reduced to the sum of its movements and tears brought on by the cold and the brutal light, confronting spume and wind, walking over sand littered with mussels, sea-shells, seaweed, trident shapes left by the feet of curlews and gulls, seeking out the solid sand at the sea’s edge to walk on as fast as they could to keep warm, they walked to where the sand is already sufficiently loaded with water to be firmer but not yet so saturated that shoes sink into it, just before the line where the wave dies, when its foam is simply froth and seems to be no longer liquid, when it is no more than a fringe of expiring bubbles at the extreme edge of all that water which continues to endure in its seething and rasping surges.

  An immense beach, Lilstein tried to position himself so that he sheltered his companion but he was puny, made hardly any difference, even by walking backwards in front of her, he was buffeted by squalls and it was the young woman who, with a laugh, was first to set herself against the wind from the sea, at an angle, she swapped places, to protect him, saying, shouting into the wind, that she could stand up to the wind better than he could and as they changed places they grabbed each other by the shoulders, from time to time they passed little old men who were gathering firewood to warm themselves by, watching this floating plank or that end of a beam which in its own good time the sea would fling on to the beach, but it was that or nothing, sometimes there was more than one old man following the same piece of wreckage, they eyed each other warily and seemed relieved that Lilstein and the young woman did not represent youthful competition, and looked at them the way you’d expect them to look at people who did not need to rescue driftwood from the waves of the sea.

  Lilstein and the young woman waved greetings, but did not stop to talk, bowled along by the expenditure of their combined energies, keeping in step, walking fast to keep warm, fighting sand and wind and the fierce flurries of stinging air which are on permanent duty for kilometre after kilometre under a storm-racked sky, lashed by gusts of wind which threatened to whip the hoods off their oilskins at any moment, forcing them to clap a frozen hand on the crown of their heads to prevent it, if they wanted to see around them they had to turn their shoulders or else partly swivel their heads inside their hoods, the wind was relentless, it blew at an angle, it swirled, always adversarial, finding a way in everywhere, laying its metal grip on everything, blasting, chilling, rending.

  Yet for all that, their sweetness continued to seek the object of its desire, the cold wind denied it each time they exchanged a glance, forcing their heads down, making them bury their chins in their shoulders at an angle, the sweetness forced to retreat into eyes that looked out from lowered heads, sweetness suspended by the pummelling which left nothing in their thoughts except the wind, left them with no feeling but weariness, lungs raw, a kind of frozen-fingered intoxication, tears cold and salty, with nothing else for it but to go on walking, and when they returned in the middle of the afternoon to the white and blue room of the low-roofed house, once they were sheltered behind the closed door, they went on staggering for several moments from the fading effects of the wind.

  What’s to be done with Lilstein in this mood who insists on telling you about Picasso, Guernica, Winter Journey, and regales you with the promises he once made on a beach? You don’t have a woman in Paris, at least not one sufficiently interesting for you to do the same and turn her into a story, you’re going to have to find something else to tell, but for the moment Lilstein goes on talking, like a man who has decided to tell all, with no thought for prudence, and you are turning into the one who listens to his secret outpourings, who’ll have to denounce Lilstein and Hatzfeld, to officials of the Party you are bent on leaving? Or to the Ministry of Internal Security?

  ‘The girl I walked with on the beach, young gentleman of France, denounced me, it’s funny, I can’t stand the thought that I was denounced and you cannot stand the thought of having denounced, yes, the charges you made were solid, I mean the ones you brought four years ago against the comrades in your cell, you remember, communists who met unofficially, there were seven or eight of them, and held endless discussions of books by Rousset and Kravchenko, and the “alleged Soviet camps”, and the Slansky trial and Tito and how to make the Party democratic? You got them thrown out of the Party by quoting Stalin and Thorez and lumping together Tito, Trotsky, Kravchenko, Slansky, the English, the police, Zionism, sorry, make that cosmopolitanism! Actually, a little too good to be true, if you will permit me a professional comment, which is why today you feel that what you did was squalid but that all you really did was cover up other things that were even more squalid, it must feel odd now to think of those you got excluded from the Party when at long last you know as much as they, Poletti, Warschawski, did.

  ‘What about the Monclars? did you ever see Monclar’s widow again? Nowadays you think like her, but the result of the charges you brought is that she’s a widow, did you really need to be so thorough? Did you have to say that there was no proof that her husband did not have any contact with the Germans during the war? No proof that he did not have! That’s good, very good, you could have kept a low profile, settled for saying that, objectively speaking, they were playing the same ga
me as the Bonn revanchists, but you decided to add a clinching argument, to add that one basic issue was worth considering, the possibility that there’d been some contact between Monclar and the Germans in 1943 when a part of the network was blown, and by raising that question you made Monclar terminally suspect, tarred him with a suspicion “which unfortunately his current attempts to sabotage Party policy could only corroborate”, this was tantamount to telling him you disapproved of the Party line in 1952, ergo you “very probably” did a deal with the Gestapo in 1943, and since we are now fighting a war we cannot afford the luxury of doubt.

  ‘Obviously you didn’t work all that out by yourself, you’d had evening classes which taught you that it’s good to corroborate, did you know they used the same line with me too in Moscow when I was being interrogated? Monclar tells you you’re a little shit, the comrade from the federation who just happens to be there that night says losing your temper does not constitute proof of innocence, good old Monclar, a perfectionist, he’s excluded, no, you’re right, he excludes himself, slams the door behind him, it makes him thoroughly miserable, and to make sure he doesn’t miss he gets hold of two revolvers, one for each temple, he fumbles, manages to burst both eyeballs, not a pretty sight, hang on, I must finish.

  ‘A week later he throws himself out of a window in the hospital, three floors, took four days to die, died like Brossolette but with Brossolette it was the Nazis and different kinds of torture, have you written to Monclar’s widow, I mean recently?

  ‘One of my closest friends was in Monclar’s network, a German antifascist with the FTP, today he’s one of our leading poets, lives in Potsdam not far from my house, a real poet, he was the one who told me the story of the bear and the hunter, though maybe it wasn’t him, no matter, sometimes we pass on secrets to each other, for the hell of it, not knowing if one of us will rat on the other, but we tell each other everything, that way the one who listens is just as guilty as the one who speaks, and if he does spill the beans he won’t last very long either – “comrade, if your contact wanted to say such stupid things, how come he trusted you so much?” – he’s for the drop too, which might even be a comfort for the friend he’s denounced, absolute transparency! Are you beginning to understand what sort of struggle I’ve got to engage in these days?