Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  ‘When I told my friend I might be meeting the Frenchman who had got Monclar thrown out of the Party, he said: “Ask him what he’s got against people who were in the Resistance.” There, I’ve done it. You think you’re a real swine, you want to leave the Party which landed you in the mire and now you’re going back to the nasty, sordid squalor you were trying to escape when you joined the Party, it would be so simple to have one squalid action to hate yourself for, such as what a young prosecuting counsel in a hurry once did, but we both know that there’s something else, and that’s why I’ve taken such a shine to you.’

  Lilstein follows the direction of your eyes, turns round, stares at the dresser with you, a complete service of painted porcelain plates.

  ‘Yes, very fine, especially the large dishes, the spinners, the country dance, I had it brought here, it isn’t Swiss, don’t you recognise it? It comes from your part of the world, it’s French, Obernai-ware, from Alsace, the couple who run the factory are of Alsatian stock, they were already here in 1929, he was on the desk and she was housekeeper, a stroke of fortune for the pair of them, they both loved France but he didn’t like being taught French by having his knuckles rapped.

  ‘In 1927, ’28, they applied for a seasonal job, they liked it, they went down well, they were kept on, when they saw Hitler beginning to stir things up in Germany, they concluded that sooner or later he’d try to move back into Alsace, so they decided to stay in Switzerland, they escaped the return of the Germans in 1940, moved up the ladder, bought the hotel in ’43, bad times for tourism. She loves presiding over the kitchen range, she can make anything, especially Linzer, these decorated plates with country scenes, they’re very peaceful, I like them a lot.’

  Lilstein turns round in his chair to show you the plates:

  ‘Can you see, there are eight different scenes for the plates, two per season, it’s rustic stuff, not very valuable, but I’m very fond of it, some of the details, let me show you, that cat in a clump of honeysuckle, it didn’t go there to take a nap, the cat creeps into the honeysuckle in the late afternoon, it lies down on its back on top of the clump just under the surface of the leaves, empty-headed blue tits beware!

  ‘Throughout the whole of your time in school, in 1943 you were fourteen, when half of the Monclar network were rounded up, there was no chance that you’d meet him or admire him, you lived the life of a cosseted schoolboy in a gorgeous apartment in Paris, large rooms, very high ceilings, cornices, gold paint, ornate chimneypieces, an apartment your papa had bought for a song after the armistice in 1940, from a man named Blumental, Blumental was a man in a hurry! In the apartment sounds were deadened by carpets and bulging cupboards, a china service with a silver thread motif off which you ate your dinner, bed linen with Blumental’s monogram, and even his children’s books, did you ever try to find out what happened to the Blumentals? Shall I take you through it and help you recapture lost time?

  ‘You suspected as much? Towards the end? There must be some details you don’t know, a valley in Savoie, white walls, lauze roof, a well, a few motorised vans one morning and your father feeling obliged to exclaim “just smell that air!”, it’s not easy to become aware of life at such moments, there too you must have hated yourself and held your tongue, because you were brought up according to solid family values, respect for your father, reserve, the authority of your elders, it’s not for you to judge them, and if the worst comes to the worst you take troubles to the priest who tells you to lift up your head to heaven, no, quite right, you’re a Protestant, but you must have loved those values before you learned to hate them, and you once believed you could put it all behind you by basking in the crimson promise of our dawn, by throwing yourself enthusiastically at the age of eighteen into the ranks of the seventy-five thousand who had been shot dead, let’s just say thousands, many thousands, and one day you discover that the Party you loved has put your best hopes to the worst possible use.

  ‘Be content, you can now feel truly sorry for yourself, it will make a change from just despising yourself, but all those others, the gentle-folk of the old caste with the best addresses who foregathered around the family table, their words still reverberate in your head, the dinners with Blumental finger-bowls, conversations about Judaeo-Bolshevism, saboteurs, the Greater Europe and the deafening silence of all these loud-mouthed people when your father had to flee the country after the Liberation, the silence of those who thought and said the same things as he did but never wrote it down or signed anything, the crimes of extreme civilisation are not crimes, these days all those people strut their stuff as good soldiers of the free world.

  ‘The Great Family awaits your return, young gentleman of France, a place has been prepared, in your name, you now have extensive experience of the world of the proletariat, so you can explain to them how it operates, how to sack a worker without repercussions, I could even saddle the said worker with five kids, that’s another so-called cliché, only society at large can manufacture clichés, but you know all this, you know what ends you will be made to serve.

  ‘And when you look in the mirror, you now have two unpleasant faces to contemplate: Narcissus and his papa, Monclar’s prosecutor and Pétain’s minister. Please remain seated, you want me to reassure you? You’re not the only one, and there’s worse to come.’

  And finally Lilstein gets round to speaking of the death of comrade Sarah Lilstein, Doctor Lilstein, ‘a great figure in the international workers’ movement’, died of pneumonia, Moscow, 1946, pneumonia, a side-effect of Auschwitz, is Lilstein really speaking of his mother or of one of his own victims? Not long ago in Moscow, some well-intentioned soul passed Lilstein a manuscript, the notes the doctor took at his mother’s bedside just before her death, it was an odd gift.

  At first, Lilstein had had his doubts, just around the time that he’d also had doubts after learning of the report on Stalin’s crimes attributed to comrade Khrushchev, there certainly were errors, with him as victim, not Stalin, the same blunders as you get in a war, a class war, but it wasn’t Stalin who fouled up, it was his underlings, Michael Lilstein was summoned to Moscow, he was received at the highest level, so you’re finding it hard to believe Khrushchev’s report, Misha? You’ve been through the mill yet you see yourself as an unfortunate exception, an intelligence worker caught up in a regrettable shambles, the stool, the endless screw and the camp, all because of the fall-out from some stupid botch-up, and Iosif Vissarionovich wasn’t in the know, nothing from which to draw sound conclusions, or better still, you sacrificed yourself after convincing yourself that it all served some useful purpose.

  And while everything was collapsing around your ears, the others, taking their lead from the role of villain which you agreed to play, became more aware, harder-working, more disciplined, and were freer to be so, and you refuse to believe it when a report says you passed on the names of innocent people, because you did actually pass on names at the time, and you’d have talked so that the terror could go on in its mindless way, it was like giving a razor to a chimpanzee, you were willing to endure the worst in order to save the best, comrade Lilstein, and I don’t want anybody telling you that all you did was to help a chimpanzee play with a razor.

  My dear Michael, you don’t believe wholeheartedly in Nikita Khrushchev’s report, so you won’t believe in the other report either, unless that report makes you want to reread the Khrushchev report.

  And Lilstein was given an unedited copy of the report attributed to Khrushchev and then the notes written by his mother’s doctor, we’ve always trusted you, we’ve taken a lot of risks on your behalf, Michael, a great many risks, when we decided to send you off in short order to the steppes in the east so that you wouldn’t have to face the sorting of the sheep from the goats after Auschwitz was liberated, don’t you remember the looks on the faces of some of your comrades when the Red Army pulled you out of the camps in Poland? The way they said see you soon? No, you thought you had nothing to fear, at the time it was a bit obvious keep
ing you well away from the screening process, true you’d acquitted yourself magnificently in the camps, there was no better organiser than you, and at the same time you had one thing going for you, you weren’t popular, that is a valuable quality the way things are these days, a few months in Kazakhstan, the sorting of wheat and chaff became less urgent, a short spell in Moscow so we could have a closer look at you, and we quickly sent you home to Rosmar, that was just ten short years ago.

  You did well at Rosmar, Misha, that general was a fool, but he gave you an opportunity to prove yourself, and then we redirected you towards the external intelligence service, that’s what saved you, we needed you, we needed your pre-war contacts, it was urgent, an invaluable source, but you were also dynamite, you’d committed a mortal sin, at a meeting at the start of the 1930s you’d seen your comrade Ulbricht sitting on a platform with Goebbels, it was in the great hall of the Friedrichshain, now that should have got you sorted for good but you were lucky, you were closely acquainted with certain people whom we needed, you had a great big American secret within arm’s reach.

  You showed you had what it takes, the men at the top were very pleased, you could have blown up in our faces but you really did us proud, it lasted five very good years, we showed the Americans and the English a thing or two, in 1951 it was your other mortal sin which unleashed the dogs, couldn’t you have phoned Adenauer or Bahr? or Bezukhov? no your name is Lilstein, that’s bad, you had that bastard Abakumov snapping at your heels, even Beria was scared, he might have come to your defence, he could have gone to see the Big Man with the moustache and said this comrade is not a cosmopolitan snake in the grass and I still need him.

  Beria didn’t dare, all we could do was take some of the heat out of the situation, have you interrogated on the stool, keep your record out of it, even so at Magadan things got out of hand, and even when Stalin died and you were released and returned to your responsibilities, you had to pledge your enthusiastic support for Beria, it wasn’t the right time, a neutral reunified Germany, a fine idea, but the timing was all wrong, but once again we saved our deposit, we told Malenkov and Ulbricht that you were our source of information about the troublemakers, you spent your time making moves you shouldn’t have made, a real gift for the inappropriate move, we took many risks for you: crawl out of the sandpit, Misha, you’ve got to play with the big boys now.

  Lilstein thanked his Soviet comrades who said they’d taken risks so that he would be spared the worst, maybe it wasn’t true, maybe nobody had been taking risks, maybe it was just a by-product of the bureaucracy, and at the time Lilstein had definitely had the feeling that he was being kept out of the limelight, that someone, perhaps the same someone who had pushed him into a car one morning with a blindfold over his eyes, was trying to spare him the worst by toning the treatment down, but after eighteen months in the camp he’d also felt that he was no longer being protected, he was sent out to do harder and harder labour, the sort you come back from feeling weaker and weaker, he saw those around him die more frequently, the comrades who said they’d always taken risks had been unable to take any more, if, that is, they’d ever taken any, but you could always pretend to believe the comrades when those who claimed to have taken risks seemed also to have taken over power, there had to be a side to be on, so some spring-cleaning is called for, open the windows, we’ve always trusted you, Michael, so here, read the notes your mother’s doctor ran risks to take instead of letting the grave swallow the errors.

  One morning, the doctor saw, drawing up outside the clinic reserved for high-ranking Party officials, the kind of car which normally brought only his most prestigious patients, just one army officer got out, silver-blue uniform, as worn by Kremlin guards, a colonel’s uniform, a life or death rank, not the sort of man you’d want to meet so early in the day, but the doctor had felt relieved that it was that day and not another because he would be able to tell the colonel that he was going to save comrade Sarah Lilstein using drugs salvaged from the imperialists, he was very hopeful of saving her, a modicum of technical expertise borrowed from the West but also a sizeable input of Soviet know-how guided by the directives of the great Stalin.

  The officer said that given the alarming nature of comrade Lilstein’s state of health, comrade Stalin had instructed comrade Ivanov to prepare a speech to honour comrade Lilstein at her funeral and that he had come to make certain arrangements in connection with the ceremony, the doctor said that fortunately there would now be no need for any such arrangement and the colonel repeated that comrade Stalin had instructed comrade Ivanov to write the funeral oration.

  The colonel had not understood what the doctor was saying, so the doctor repeated that he could, indeed was going to, save comrade Lilstein’s life, he spoke with a cheerfulness intended to carry the colonel along on the tide of his enthusiasm.

  And once more the colonel talked about Ivanov and the speech, and the doctor heard his guts rumble, he clenched his buttocks, and then contracted the muscles to prevent having an accident more befitting a toddler, and with the contraction and the cramps in his intestines came understanding, and with understanding his voice began to tremble at the moment when, for the third time, he was about to inform the colonel who seemed so hard of hearing that comrade Ivanov’s oration would not be needed, his voice shook, his jaw trembled, the words made no sense, panic spread to his airways, lips, the rest of him, he said nothing.

  He did not give her penicillin and he felt so bad about this that he kept as close an eye on her as if she’d been his own mother, he took notes of what she said when she grew feverish, a kind of shorthand record of her delirium, because he was meticulous, out of medical scrupulousness, a good reason, they were notes taken with a view to a ‘Nosography of a Fever-Induced Delirium’, and all the while he was taking his notes he experienced a terror even more intense than that which had made him feel like a private on latrine fatigue reporting to the colonel of the guard.

  But a second visitation by terror did not stop him taking dangerous notes, this second terror had been forced to admit defeat for, unlike the first which had only morality to overcome, the second had found itself up against remorse which is, in regimes which require strict observance, the only means of achieving dignity.

  And his notes had been found by them, some of them made it their business to ensure that the good doctor disappeared, but another group of them had arranged for the notes to be completed, in secret.

  From the time she felt sure she was going to die, and this was in the month of March 1946, comrade Sarah Lilstein began to babble, it was, noted the doctor, as if she’d understood everything, the toing and froing in the corridor, the decision that penicillin was contraindicated, the substitution of her nurses by others, it was as if she’d felt relieved by such signs of her imminent demise and had deliberately used her fevered state to let her thoughts run wild, so that she could say whatever she liked behind her ravings, think freely under the cover of the rambling state of mind they’d induced in her, think without being afraid of seeing death loom up before her, because death was there with her already, let her mind ramble without being afraid that friends and loved ones would be accused of plotting, since the proof of a rambling mind is in the excess of its rambling, in the things no healthy person would dream of saying.

  Above all you had to avoid doing anything that might moderate the incoherence of your ramblings, in fact this would only prove that your mind was not wandering, so if your mind was really wandering you had no choice but to tell all and hold nothing back, so if you said you’d like to cut great Stalin’s balls off with Lev Davidovich Bronstein’s rusty scissors you ran fewer risks than if you didn’t dare go that far and made do, for example, with saying that the great leader had fucked up more than once on the agricultural policy front.

  So Sarah Lilstein began to babble her way towards the worst things that could be said, she went on believing she could think under the cover of her ravings, keep control of her divagations, rave with the lucid
ity of the very drunk, and while she raved be both the Fool who raves and Shakespeare who makes him wise, Ariadne and the labyrinth, the egregious labyrinth, the eddy and the thing that thinks in the eddy, the eddy which scourges and dilutes everything in its wake, its history and its present, Sarah delving deep into her reserves, in the throbbing of her temples with a temperature of forty and eight tenths, and the fever entered into the very heart of her, took the place of the thought she believed she could control – and so, what she was trying to leave behind her to give a meaning to those fevered moments, now lost all meaning just when she was trying to find one, her ramblings were no longer a mask for her thoughts but the shape of the life she had led: her fevered outpourings were History itself.

  Just a few images remained, the only ones that seemed still to have a meaning, a young woman in tears at the funeral of Rosa Luxemburg, then the young woman found herself in the clinic on the outskirts of Moscow and there unleashed a volley of curses even before she turned herself back into an old, dying woman Yezhov little shit Jdanov arsehole let Yezhov cut Stalin’s head off and then into the blood pumping out, into the blood pumping out at the base of his throat, let him cast the whole decapitated world, a serpent-world, the poster that had so enraged her before the war showing homeland commissar Yezhov, massive in his red uniform, filling the whole right-hand side with his arm pointing out his hand inside a glove, wool or iron no way of telling which, throttling a viper under its chin its head is made of a number of heads belonging to homunculi, the men condemned to death in the thirties, Trotsky the viper’s tail in the shape of a swastika the tiny heads Bukharin Rykov spitting blood squeezed out by Yezhov’s massive gloved hand, tiny heads with big noses thick lips brown hair bloodshot popping eyes as seen also at the time in posters in Berlin or Nuremberg disgraceful at the time she’d only seen the poster, not the big noses.