Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  De Vèze managed to get away, he’ll never understand why she is jealous, she never asks him anything about what he gets up to when he goes abroad, but the moment he’s back in France he’s not allowed to speak to another woman, he said nothing, he left without trying for a parting shot.

  ‘A remarkable officer, Henri old man,’ said the Minister as he introduced the plumber with the cockerel strut, ‘and a great expert on matters of interest to us.’

  An expert, in other words a tool, thinks de Vèze, not much good will come from this meeting, they didn’t haul me back from Moscow so I could have a three-way chat with an expert like him, French interests or no French interests, God! wherever you go there’s the same nauseating atmosphere, whether it’s the Quai d’Orsay or the Élysée or any of the ministries; since getting back from Moscow de Vèze has not succeeded in having one serious conversation with any of his old colleagues, all he’s met are edgy types, shiftier than usual, the smell of fear.

  And the more scared they are the higher their rank, two of them, men he’d fought alongside during the war, accepted his invitation to dinner only to cancel at the last minute. De Vèze had never known anything like it, not even in the darkest days of Gaullism, during the generals’ putsch, it’s as if I’ve got the plague, and they’d been adventurers together!

  The only one who came, not to greet him – in the Quai d’Orsay everyone says hello to everyone else – no, the only one who lingered longer than the thirty seconds demanded by etiquette and had, as they say, struck up a conversation, was Xavier Poirgade, he was coming down the great staircase as de Vèze was arriving, Poirgade, the grey diplomat, they’d known each other for over ten years, they’d met in Singapore, the least adventurous of diplomats, nowadays he’s not even a diplomat, he left the Foreign Office to direct an institute for strategic studies at ten times the salary, Poirgade’s got a good head on his shoulders, with his little beard, grey suit, manicured hands, has all the time in the world to chat pleasantly at the head of the great staircase with a man who’s got the plague, does it because he likes to provoke, so pleased to see you again, Mr Ambassador, peculiar atmosphere, don’t you think? A little tête-à-tête, people walk up, walk down, stare at them.

  Poirgade stares at the starers, head tilted back, index finger under his chin, a defiant stance that says I refuse to allow the fact that de Vèze the bruiser is in a pickle to make me look like a poltroon in public, the Ambassador is wearing well, that little green ribbon in the lapel keeps a man young, he doesn’t like me but he’s happy to have me on hand so that he can be seen on the great staircase, I can’t stand his sort, a skirt-chaser, a show-off, a big mouth, serve him right this business is catching up on him now, albatross around his neck, won’t be long before he’s all washed up, got to be nice to the flotsam so they last longer, I loved the interview you did for Le Figaro, Mr Ambassador, you won’t have pleased everybody by reminding them of the Atlantic and the Urals, but really first-rate, enjoy it while you can, Excellency, you’re nowhere near getting yourself out of the mire, you know, I’m younger than you, I never knew those days, not as an adult, but I agree completely with you, I support your ideas unequivocally, you have no idea how far I go to support you, Sexcellency, I support you as the rope supports the hanged man, and I am prepared to be so supportive as to untie the rope just as you’re about to choke, but only so that I can pull it tight again.

  De Vèze doesn’t like Poirgade, he has ‘I can talk to you because I’m above suspicion’ written all over him, Poirgade tells him: look at these people, they say hello but when they walk past they stay close to the wall, they scuttle, de Vèze could have stayed silent, he’s going to be late for the Minister, but he can’t resist adding a word about his comrades from the days of that Great Adventure who are now making themselves scarce, do you remember, says Poirgade: ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’ shows we’re getting old, must have been a dozen years ago, I reckon? De Vèze remembers very well, the dinner in Singapore and over the meal the exclamation, the last word, at the time he didn’t give a damn, ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’ words spoken by a drunk, and today the fear is everywhere, old companions backing off, de Vèze can’t stand Poirgade and yet here he is speaking to him in confidence, the weakness of his old companions who are ditching him, why are you telling him all this? you’re a coward too, you’re only talking to this grey diplomat because he dares to be seen with you in public, a beard which just circles his mouth, like a monkey’s bum, you never did like the man.

  Poirgade has made the most of his opportunity and now de Vèze understands why he wanted to speak to him, heard anything more about that couple? The historian and his wife? As if you didn’t know, you hypocrite, it hardly seems possible that Poirgade is unaware that the historian and his wife have divorced, or that he doesn’t know what the grounds for it were, he looks pleasantly at de Vèze who feels like replying: I don’t know about the husband but the latest on the wife is that when I’m in Paris I still give her a good rogering, it works out very nicely, thanks, she’s got a bit of a short fuse and doesn’t care for red braces, but is very affectionate in her middle age.

  Poirgade is a busybody who sprays gossip around, people think he sells information about strategy but in reality it’s the gossip that interests his clients, his clientele is apparently drawn from the highest levels, international seminars, those dinners, he measures his words carefully over the coffee, heard the latest? Handsome de Vèze, still shacked up with Morel’s ex! Wonderful example of fidelity, she leads him an awful dance but he always goes back, de Vèze is about to ditch Poirgade on the stairs, Poirgade senses it coming, I must leave you, Mr Ambassador, I gather the Minister is waiting, good day.

  ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’ and it’s not in this ministerial office that de Vèze is likely to retrieve it, with this other dimwit with the crewcut and cockerel strut they’ve foisted on him, and all on account of a rumour, hearsay, yes many tongues wagging and many ears flapping, it’s hard to say exactly what’s being said but it’s common knowledge, it acquires credibility by sheer weight of numbers, no one’s laughing now, and when the talking stops it’s worse, there’s a shabby silence every time you want to talk to the allies, you go to meetings, to begin with everything’s fine, the flags flap, present arms, doors are opened for you, people greet you, there is warmth in the handshakes and because you’re there they make the most of the opportunity to discuss the diameter of waste-paper baskets, even the Germans give you the treatment, though every six months one of them feels the need to jump out of the window of his office.

  The Iron Curtain? The Wall? The Germans are all jolly good pals! Every summer they all get together in Hungary and after the fourth glass of schnapps there is only one Greater Germania, über alles, with Bayreuth as capital! And this stupid clod of a Minister allows the strutting plumber to say his piece, my God they’re giving me instructions, a mole, at home in France, they take us for Englishmen, and today the English are laughing their socks off, saying we’re just imitating them.

  The worst of it is that everyone knows now, and the President can’t come up with anything better than to put a woman on the case, of course he can bring women into whatever he likes, create all the State secretariats he wants for the distaff side, but he shouldn’t bring them into serious matters.

  And he did bring one in, intriguing name, Chagrin, Michèle Chagrin, a spinster’s name, flat-chested, large chin, hair prematurely grey which she hasn’t bothered to dye, the President made her responsible for the file, direct orders from the Élysée, Chagrin began her career in the Army Ministry in 1964 or ’65, ex-student of the École nationale d’administration, did not graduate with flying colours, no way could she be called an intelligence expert, her field was administrative law, but for those military types even legal expertise was too much in a woman, they pushed her out, she left Paris.

  What did she do then? she got herself noticed in the provinces for her serious approach to work, in the Auv
ergne, a prefect who says to the Minister of Finance I’ve got a remarkable woman in charge of my legal department, and the Minister poached her from the prefect, the minister becomes President with a capital P, Chagrin follows him, still on the legal side.

  When the tale of the mole became a subject for a proper file, and a proper file is a file with a legal dimension, someone was needed to manage it properly, she was on hand, at least she was good at keeping on top of files, she ended up as overall coordinator, a woman of the shadows, never seen in receptions, never observed outside office hours, she was neither acolyte nor friend.

  The men who came to report to the Élysée didn’t like her, they’d found a nickname for her, and they’d made sure she knew what it was, she even used it herself on occasions: ‘Lady Piddle’, civilians had never accepted her any more than the military did, but there had to be someone – not to make them agree, that was impossible, and just as well – but to provide liaison, syntheses, avoid catastrophic short-circuits, yes, and years down the line it was still her nickname, a rather good one, don’t you say it isn’t, I like it, and it suits me better and better because I’m getting on now and I stay in my small corner, even if it is in the Elysée, and also because when they walk into my little old lady’s office they get more and more nervous because they’ve got older too, because I know more and more about them and because I’ve acquired more and more responsibilities, not power, power is political.

  I am Michèle Chagrin, civil service administrator, my responsibilities are defined by departmental order, I take no action which lies outside my official remit, I draft notes, and when a note seems to be satisfactory, then an officer, a colonel or higher, may be sent to Mourmelon or Lure, what a life, that’s why it makes them nervous when they walk into my office, they’re all incompetent, they see traitors everywhere, that prevents them from rooting out the real spies, especially the one who’s been making life difficult for us these last ten years, yes, I’ve also been useless at winkling the swine out, but that’s no reason for not managing the file properly.

  Lady Piddle did not summon de Vèze, she bumped into him in town, as the saying goes, she was very nice to him, she looked like an unmade bed, we’ve got a lot of problems just now, she didn’t ask anything of him, she talked about people with experience, ones you could still, thank God, count on, right?

  At what point did people really start to be afraid of Lady Piddle? when she got the scalp of a minister, a blabbermouth, confidential documents – no, not top-secret defence documents, papers from Cabinet meetings, yes, one set per minister, and some of it very sensitive – documents which often made a public appearance on the front page of a certain large-circulation evening newspaper.

  Little Miss Chagrin was endlessly patient, low-ranking and high-powered, it took almost a whole parliamentary session, she made small changes in the figures in selected files which were handed out to Cabinet members, doctoring the set of figures given to this or that minister, just one set, not all of them, a small alteration after the decimal point, she did it each time she switched her attention to a new suspect, until one day a figure she had lightly modified found its way into the columns of a well-known evening paper, even so that proved nothing in itself, a minister may have a score of close colleagues who have sight of the same documents as their chief, Chagrin didn’t get excited, she multiplied the opportunities for temptation, one day she circulated three pages of a draft general budget to all ministers.

  The minister under suspicion happened to be ill that day, the file was sent to him at home by motorcycle messenger, in it one of the figures that had been changed just for him, he got it a quarter of an hour before the leading daily was put to bed, and the figure in question was published on page one in the early afternoon edition, with the small alteration, the Lady went to see the President, very well, Chagrin, tell him I want to see him and you shall be present at the interview, you’ll be there with the correct version of the file. No need to get unduly worked up, this sort of thing never goes to court, a month later the minister resigned, entered a clinic, he’d known the President for a quarter of a century, it was such a stupid thing to do, so why did he do it?

  Illusions about the power of the press? or maybe the newspaper had something on him, or maybe for the fun of it, you’d never guess how many people do this sort of thing for the hell of it, I know a secret, I mustn’t circulate it, if I circulate it I run the risk of being publicly disgraced, real Russian roulette, click, no one saw, didn’t get caught, and I’m king of the castle, actually no one ever did find out what the minister’s reasons were, it was even suggested that he was the Russian mole, a charge of culpable intelligence with the enemy could have been made to stick, but he didn’t know enough, and besides the mole didn’t stop digging.

  And it was for this that de Vèze had been obliged to leave in his bed a woman who will never forgive him for the coarse words which had passed her lips, so there was a mole at the top, or in a major embassy, as seemed very likely.

  A major embassy? could it be mine? Was all this designed to promote a few plumbers? The Americans had already tried the same thing under de Gaulle in ’66, de Vèze remembers it well, it was a year after the famous evening in Singapore, the Americans and the ‘porous’ French! They claimed to have names.

  At least at the time we didn’t allow ourselves to be taken in by silly stories, no one believed that guff about having the names of dodgy individuals, they did it to pay us back for a speech de Gaulle had just made, in Asia, at Phnom Penh, a hundred thousand people, interminable ovations especially when he said that the Americans were facing ‘a national resistance’, that they should pledge to send their troops home, wild cheering, and then the best part, yes, it guaranteed everlasting hatred, that there was ‘no way the people of Asia would ever submit to the rule of foreigners who came from the other side of the Pacific’, Charles the Great, the Americans were purple with rage, a Moscow agent couldn’t have done better, we’ll teach you ‘rule of foreigners’, de Gaulle is just an agent for Moscow, Peking, any country that’s coloured red, a radical act of betrayal, he never liked us, never forgave us for Yalta nor for our support for Algerian independence, no, that’s not paying us back in our own coin, the domino effect, it’s not the same, we’ll explain it to you some day if you want to hear it, for the moment we’ll destabilise you, there’s a mole in de Gaulle’s entourage, a hefty rumour, totally spurious, the Americans came clean about it much later, if you get the message, a load of codswallop, it was all part of the game.

  But now, in ’78, there’s a full quarantine, it’s already lasted more than a year, the counter-espionage people are very frustrated, they’ve been through all the biographies, pulled skeletons out of cupboards, set these people against those people, all hands on deck, plus a hunt for queers, like in England, suicides of a handful of men with wives and children, they also interviewed former members of the Normandie-Niémen squadron, why did you go to the USSR at that time?

  ‘To have the pleasure of taking orders from a general who is a traitor!’

  The same treatment meted out to old friends who had worked alongside communists during the Resistance, Guillaume, he’d told them straight:

  ‘Go ahead, I’m used to it!’

  And he pointed to his finger-tips. At the end of six months they’d had to tell the other African light cavalryman to call off his dogs, real moles aren’t easy to catch, true, but we’ve still got this damned quarantine to deal with, rumours, echoes of echoes, and even the Italians seem to be keeping things from us.

  It was so good, before, in the desert, ‘de Vèze, you lead’ and away they went, ‘you’ll link up with Amilakhvari and his Foreign Legion brigade, he’s got six hours to make it, before sunrise’, and away we went, over sand and shale Bir Hakeim or Qdret-el-Himeimat, 1942, an adventure on sand and shale against Rommel.

  Then one day, much later, a formal dinner in Singapore, ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’, some guffawing jester with big ears
shouts these words at you, old but sprightly, had a way with him, shady type, like Scapin in the play who never lets anyone put anything across him, everyone around the table found it hilarious, and it takes de Vèze nearly fifteen years to realise that the jester was right, it took until the day the companions who’d shared the Great Adventure started refusing to have dinner with him because the morons in counterespionage were busy setting up tradecraft here there everywhere.

  Now if de Vèze has understood correctly, the Minister is asking him to take the strutting cockerel to Moscow, in his diplomatic bag, it’s a provocation, stay calm, they’re trying to force you into a wrong move.

  De Vèze becomes engrossed in his scrutiny of the large brass inkstand which occupies the left-hand side of the Minister’s desk, it must be a good thirty centimetres tall, two horses rearing up on hind legs over two hooded urns, two riders, one holding a drawn sabre, the other a lance, de Vèze wonders when this object might date from, it could be Second Empire, but are they cuirassiers? They don’t have breastplates, hussars? no, these have helmets with a crest and slung over the flank of one of the horses there’s a rifle, so they’re dragoons, Third Republic then, but before 1914, when some people still pretended to believe in lance and sabre charges, grand-scale heroics, or the very first days of the Great War, charging at the Hun with sabres drawn before the statisticians at HQ had worked out that as a tactic it meant large losses for small gains.

  De Vèze’s father fought in the 1914-18 war, was in it until 1917, the year he lost a leg, never talked to him about the war, military medal, croix de guerre, Legion of Honour, mentioned in despatches many times, and never a word about the war, a silent hero, the house was all silence, his mother even more silent than his father.