Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  Whenever Sarah, having nightmares within some episode full of nightmares, began to doubt, she remembers, the beginnings, when she had to tell herself this is a nightmare, it’ll pass, it’s passing, another nightmare, which passes, from nightmare to nightmare people pass, not the nightmares, a mortiferous process which swallows orders in Russian and spits them out again in a variety of foreign languages, those were the words of Clara Zetkin, ‘the meaning and content of the Russian Revolution are being reduced to a set of rules like those of the Pickwick Club’, Clara Zetkin attended the Party conference at Tours, she had spoken in support of the twenty-one conditions, and here she was, talking of a Pickwick-type club, of a mortiferous machine, she died saying ‘through the midnight gloom I look to the future with optimism’, that was in 1933.

  Sarah whispering the whisper of her friend Clara Zetkin, and the hospital attendants did not dare go into her room, may Yezhov enter into Stalin and father a monstrous offspring, Beria saying when Yezhov was liquidated I realised that nothing was to be gained by always saying yes to Stalin, Yezhov plunging into the entrails of great Stalin and out of him siring the swastika-tailed heir who shall sit at the head of what the republic of soviets has been turned into, the optimists can go to hell, listen to the laughter of Bukharin, Kamenev and all those who scale the heavens.

  Let them all laugh like hanged men who point to the sky with their third foot, let them watch while Stalin dies clubbed to death by Yezhov as they themselves died and may the diminutive Bronstein die a second death along with all those who believed in it all, the innocents who pledged their future to it and into the great receptacle along with the entrails and afterbirth shall go the Orthodox popes who manufactured terror and the rabbis who processed obedience and the men who worshipped organisation, the heroes of labour, the heroes of war, the commissars and the Vlassovs, the same vessel, Tukhachevsky and his fiddle.

  May no one ever again sire believers, Nicolas the cretin, the imbecile Tsarina, the incompetent executioners, the innocents who confess, the martyrs who smile, Lenin who laughs, and all bide their time for the succession in the coming days, the child which Stalin held in the photo, the Bouriate girl, daughter of a regional secretary, she broke free from her parents at some reception or other and jumped into the arms of the Grandfather with the moustache, millions of copies of that photo were printed, the little girl with the slightly oriental eyes, behold, peoples of the world, the only union that is not racist!

  The little girl wore a beatific smile and the grandfather smiled beneath his cap, the father is executed during the purges of the following year, the mother exiled in the north, and the mother dies of typhoid, though not according to a KGB note found later, the note asks Moscow what shall we do with this woman who most likely knew certain things? and the reply slip is rubber-stamped: ‘For Elimination’.

  The little girl was luckier than her father and mother and the great communist philosopher who gave philosophy lessons to the people’s father, I would like, the people’s father told him, to learn all about Hegel, and everything went smoothly, and when the professor reached the dialectic of reason he was dispatched to a camp, Sarah Lilstein hears the voice of her friend Aïno Kuusinen, wife of one of the leaders of the Komintern, said I was invited with my husband Otto, in 1928, Black Sea, a cruise, lovely boat, a small very ordinary cabin, a sailor brings champagne, biscuits, lovely song on the gramophone, ‘Souliko’.

  I myself shall serve my guests, says Stalin. We sip our drinks, Stalin replays the record, he drinks, stares at us, laughs, when the Georgian song ends he plays it again, serves another round of drinks, laughs louder and louder, starts to dance, plays the record once more, replays the same song all through the afternoon, it grows less and less lovely, Stalin jigs up and down, he shouts with laughter, he is drunk, from time to time he stands at the ship’s stern, gazes at the water and the wake as it closes up behind the ship, then returns looking bored.

  Again he starts jig-jigging to the music of the gramophone and all the while never stops observing us, the Komintern transmitted to the NKVD information given to it by the NKVD, you’ve got it, closed-circuit, Willi Münzenberg has links with Radek, Radek is shot, Münzenberg refuses to return to Moscow, a three-year reprieve, the NKVD finally catches up with him in a forest in France, that’s the story, Stalin is happy, why did we ever allow that drunken Georgian to grow so big?

  Why? Because you were bastards, cowards, fools, psychopaths, monsters, devils, that’s the answer you’ll get from the moralists, psychologists and believers, so lump them together with the Orthodox popes, the rabbis, the bastards, the cowards, the commissars, the psychopaths, it’s no use, Stalin already did it, he had the brain of an Orthodox pope, a psychopath and a rabbi, and a commissar too; when they all landed up together at twenty below, each of them given a pick to hack at the permafrost, and among them some were innocent, Sarah tried to do something, no longer out of duty but from the remorse she felt at not having done what now clearly appeared to have been the duty she should have done when everything was already beyond the reach of remorse, or rather she acted not from remorse but because from that time on there could never be anything else, not remorse nor hope, even hope had become something dirty, Thälmann died at Buchenwald and his secretary Werner Hirsch died in the Lubyanka, Sarah spoke and talked and spoke out.

  ‘So you see, young Frenchman, the worst of it was reading what my mother thought at the end of her life, my mother never betrayed anything or anyone, I don’t think she ever committed a crime but when she stopped and looked back over the road that had been travelled all she saw was a petrified storm, even in Doctor Zhivago, at the end there is no paradise but there is still a desire for it, a hint of “in spite of everything” with the young people who will fall in love, a red scarf tied round their necks, it still reads like a progressive novel, whereas in the good doctor’s notes was a half-century predicated on a paradise to come and it turned my stomach.’

  *

  That morning, in the Konditorei in the village, Lilstein’s other interview had proved to be very difficult, much more so than his talk with the ‘young gentleman of France’. Kappler had wasted no time and immediately barked at Lilstein:

  ‘They put pressure on the Hungarians to fight and then left them in the lurch, CIA broadcasts told the Hungarians to take up arms, to set up a central military command, you know all this far better than I do, Lilstein, Radio Free Europe told the insurgents, go to it, reinforcements are on the way, the station was CIA-controlled and people believed what it said. That’s why I’m going back to Rosmar.’

  Kappler’s voice booms in the dim light of the Konditorei, even the patron behind the bar does not succeed in ignoring a voice which threatens to explode at any moment. Kappler continues to speak and in his voice there is hatred for anyone who refuses to believe what it says. Lilstein has never seen his old friend like this:

  ‘I’m going back to Rosmar because the Americans made the Russians believe that they would intervene to help the Hungarians, they said to the people of Györ and Budapest go ahead NATO is coming to the rescue, the Russians laid about them as only they know how, maybe they only went at it so hard because they thought NATO might turn up and NATO didn’t budge, I know now that there’ll be no cavalry riding in from outside, I hate Russian tanks but I hate even more the scum who are now shedding crocodile tears, they landed the Hungarians in the deepest shit and now they’re staging a great international weeping-and-wailing-fest, there’ll be no serious intervention from outside.’

  And Lilstein knew then that he would lose, that Kappler had looped his loopiest loop, no hope of any intervention from outside, he has just one hope left, that something might turn up from inside the country itself, that’s why he’s going back to the GDR, Lilstein has twigged that Kappler still had that one hope left: he wanted to make a difference.

  If he was to be prevented from returning, this last hope had to be destroyed, Lilstein had a choice, either kill off the object of that ho
pe or cut the legs from under the man who hoped it, at first he opted to destroy Kappler’s hopes, he did not draw pictures for him or offer an analysis, he just said:

  ‘All my Minister’s good at is scratching his arse, and he’s the second highest-ranking minister of the State which you wish to join, he’s the Interior Minister of the Socialist Workers’ and Peasants’ State and a member of the Politburo of the Unified Socialist Party of Germany, the second most important person in the country, and all this Minister is good at is arse-scratching, and that’s the kind of country you want to go back to?’

  That made Kappler laugh a long, optimistic laugh, he glanced up towards the patron of the Konditorei, pointed to the empty carafe, the man came over to serve them, Kappler joked with him, he was almost relaxed.

  So then Lilstein decided to disable Kappler, he had a choice of allowing him into the GDR to be roasted on a slow spit or do him real damage so that he might live:

  ‘I know exactly why you want to come over to us, Herr Kappler: eccentricity. You pretend to be eccentric because you’ve turned into a second-rate author, a writing machine, an old bruiser.’

  And Lilstein put in the boot:

  ‘You’re trying to act like a somebody because nowadays you write like a nobody.’

  Kappler flushed, Lilstein went on:

  ‘You know what you’re going to do once you’re back in the German Democratic Republic? You will prevent our young writers developing in their own way, you’ll cramp their style, the moment they try to come up with something new my Minister and his small-minded comrades will tell them to stop writing tripe, stop imitating the capitalist ways of doing things – at first that’s what they’ll say – if you imitate capitalist ways it will mean that we won’t allow you to publish anything, if you continue making trouble they’ll say you’re imitating imperialist ways, and that’s much more serious, capitalism is there, a fact of life, but imperialism is aggressive, which means that you’re in cahoots with those who wish to attack us, that you imitate imperialist ways.

  ‘From a literary point of view, that means nothing, Herr Kappler, but coming from them it means “we’re going to put you in jail”, thus far they’ve locked up young people who just wanted to be different, but soon they’ll be jailing anyone who doesn’t want to resemble what you’ve turned into, they’ll say look at Kappler, the penny’s dropped with him, he’s come in from outside and he’s setting you an example, he’s seen through it all, and anyone can read his books, it’s all perfectly transparent, so cut out all this symbolic or imperialistic petit-bourgeois posturing.

  ‘So you do see what purpose you’ll serve, Herr Kappler, don’t you? You’ll be used to prevent any other Kapplers coming through, I mean Kapplers like the Kappler of the twenties and thirties, now defunct. For a quarter of a century you’ve written nothing remarkable, nowadays you’re just a biographer, that’s why you want to go back, so that people will cheer the man you’re ashamed to have become.’

  That’s how in the dimly lit Konditorei earlier that day Lilstein had advanced, destroying Kappler, feeling that he could weep, fabricating lies, lies which nevertheless were powerful, for they made Kappler turn bright red, made his chin tremble, Lilstein greatly admired Kappler’s latest books, but he shot them down in flames while he looked on, all to prevent him returning to Rosmar.

  ‘This notion that you would construct a narrative using the great days of the first half of the century was quite clever, Herr Kappler, a few dozen sequences, magnificent stuff, all the academies admired your last offering, but I know that the Kappler of 1929 would never have published it, he would have sat down in front of this succession of sequences and asked himself how it could all be brought together. He’d have buckled down to it, he’d have looked for a form.’

  Lilstein lying to destabilise Kappler, using any means to ensure that Kappler does not go back:

  ‘You’re writing now like Turgenev or Anatole France, you write like they did before the war, I mean the 1914 war, it’s so earnest and antiquated, how can you expect to have anything to say?’

  And the deeper Lilstein goes in with his lie, the easier the words come, the more convinced he feels that he is right, the quicker Kappler’s pages turn yellow, he knows what the ideologues of the GDR will do, threaten young writers, what’s all this rubbish about disjointed narratives? and your petit-bourgeois monologues, stream of consciousness, conscious smut more like, pornography, you get these ideas from the Yanks, from a reactionary pro-slaver, that apple of their eye, Faulkner, or the traitor Dos Passos, now take Kappler, he’s come back from there, from your precious West, he’s tried it all and he’s reverted to realism and a voice that tells things like they are, clearly, so everyone can understand, in the order they happen.

  Lilstein talks to Kappler about what the Party ideologues will do, and the further he goes the more he feels he is right to say it, the more sympathetic he feels to those imperialist writers who are no more imperialist than Cholokhov who isn’t imperialist at all, Kappler is old.

  ‘Your books are closets for old clothes, Herr Kappler, as a form of writing the equivalent of antique furniture, too genteel, and to escape it you’re opting for a freakish course of action.’

  That’s how Lilstein managed to get Kappler to snap:

  ‘That’s enough!’

  Several times, and the last in a bare whisper:

  ‘That’s enough!’

  And stop Lilstein did, he’d have liked to add that young people in the GDR had no need of the portable hell which Kappler has been dragging around with him since the beginning of time, he felt it wasn’t necessary, they drank slowly, Kappler looked around the small bar area of the Konditorei, he didn’t speak again, he seemed lost among the shelves of pots and pans and groceries, he allowed Lilstein to pay the bill, he then bought a few bars of chocolate, they left together, their footsteps were muffled by the snow as they walked towards the little bridge, they stopped, they looked up towards the edge of the forest, eyes peeled, Kappler asked:

  ‘Tell me, young Lilstein, have you seen her again?’

  Then they moved on and made for the village, the landscape was white but in shadow now, snow waiting for more snow, Kappler wanted Lilstein to escort him to the bus, at the last moment he said to Lilstein: ‘I’m going back to Rosmar because you’ve done your damnedest to stop me, I’m going back because there must be people around you who think like you, I have no illusions about what the GDR is like today, I just believe that there is more to be done there than in the West, I’d still like to achieve something before it’s too late for me, it’s no good saying any more, I still want to write new things, and I also believe that you still have decent thoughts.’

  ‘Thoughts aren’t enough, Herr Kappler, a group of people who have fine thoughts can do a great deal of harm, and they are the worst kind.’

  Hans said to him:

  ‘Actually, young Lilstein, I like you best when you’re trying to be stupid.’

  *

  Years later, one day when Lilstein has behaved very affectionately towards you, when he’s called you ‘young gentleman of France’ three times on the trot, you will take your courage in both hands and raise the subject of Kappler, Lilstein will give you an unvarnished account of the talk he’d had that morning with his old friend before meeting you that same afternoon, when it was your turn. He’ll say that it had taken a long time for him to forgive himself for failing to find a way of undermining Kappler’s resolve.

  Then you’ll ask Lilstein what he would have done if you too had said no.

  He’ll reply that he’d have let you go, to live your life in the great wide world, but you have never been sure that this was true. Still, you never asked him outright if he would have arranged for you to disappear.

  One day he’ll say that even without him you would have taken the same path, you like influence, especially the influence which multiplies the power of the men who work in the shadows, ultimately it’s an acceptable word, oh it’s m
ost unlikely that you would ever have acquired links, not with anybody, you would have been your own master. Lilstein knows two or three gossipy types in Paris who are paid with signs of consideration, not by him, by the Russians, loose tongues in high places, you would have played that game with much more finesse, but you would have had no real influence, not with any camp, whereas with Lilstein it was real politics, you went forward together, you gave each other presents, gifts, counter-gifts, you betrayed no one and you acted in tandem, really a most lordly occupation.

  You were both standing at Klosters in front of the locomotive of a mountain railway, Lilstein told you that the first time he ever saw you in the Waldhaus in 1956 he was desperate because he’d failed with Kappler and he’d decided to speak to you as if you were his last chance.

  There were ants in the grass between the rails in front of the engine, Lilstein spoke in a cynical voice:

  ‘See? we’re like them, ants standing in the path of a huge railway engine, some have given up wanting to know and just haul their grain of barley without asking questions, other ants say I’m going to make the engine back off, others again say it’ll roll clean over me, there’ll always be some people who get it right, but with us it’s not the same. We’ve got the message: we play with model railways.’