Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  All de Vèze knows about the First World War he has got out of books and from a handful of tales told by friends of his father, away from the house, there were also a few personal reminiscences of his junior schoolteachers or masters at his lycée, men who had gone to fight, the need took them sometimes, towards the end of the afternoon, instead of teaching the syllabus they’d look out of the window and start to talk, it was always the same thing, in the end we stopped paying much attention, we felt they had an urge to tell true stories, but at the same time they didn’t want to put us off, and even when they’d started with a note of anger in their voice, anger against war, wounds, dying, the screams, the stupidity, that pointless war, it nevertheless always ended by sounding like what got printed in the newspapers on the eve of 11 November, no one was going to say we fought this war for nothing, we owed it to the dead not to admit anything of the sort, anger against war, anger against Germany which hadn’t wanted to pay up, still hadn’t paid up, nothing very specific about the war itself, de Vèze’s friends knew his father, were proud of having a friend with a father like that, they also were proud of boys who were orphans, but that was less tangible than the wooden leg and walking stick of de Vèze senior when he crossed the school yard to go to his class.

  One of his father’s friends told him a tale or two of charges launched by the French cavalry at the very start of the war, follies perpetrated by dragoons, what a joke, an embryonic charge cast in brass on the desk of a minister who can’t ever have been on a horse in his life, or picture the Minister sitting backwards on the horse, the sabre in one hand and the gee-gee’s tail in the other, think Daumier, an urge to chuck it all in and shoot off for a week in Dinard with Little Miss Jealousy, he’ll have to earn forgiveness for the disgraceful words she used, all his fault, a room with a view of the sea, a good way of getting it all back together again, breakfast in bed, croissants, she slices her croissant open, spreads red-current jelly, closes it and dunks.

  And once she’s finished, she stretches and waggles her legs.

  She brings up their quarrel again, he replies:

  ‘Bad language? You used bad language the other day? I don’t remember, oh yes, what was it that woman did to me? What did you call her?’

  And she would say:

  ‘It was because I love you, you laugh when I get angry. That day, when you went off to see your Minister, I knew exactly what you were thinking.’

  She would like to provoke him into saying something hurtful, she dreams of having a scene, I’m the only one she can have scenes with now.

  ‘Henri, I’m sure you were thinking it was better when I was still married, I know you, I can read you like a book, you can come right out with it.’

  No way! Dinard, you mustn’t go there together, she’d have time to stock up on good intentions, besides in a railway compartment she can be unbearable, putting a hand on his thigh, fooling around, laying her head on his shoulder, getting all hot and bothered with her eyes shut, in full view of the other passengers, she doesn’t see them, she knows they’re looking at her, that they’re looking at de Vèze, that it makes him feel uncomfortable, she loves it, she whispers:

  ‘I don’t care what other people think, I’m in love!’

  Once she pulled a similar stunt in a cinema queue, she clung to him, said over and over I love your neck, I love your back, she was whispering but there were people not fifty centimetres away, she slips her hand round to de Vèze’s back, under his jacket, her hand slides down, her fingers pull the tail of his shirt up, fingers on his skin, on his buttocks, she said I love stroking you there, they were going to see Apocalypse Now! There’s nothing she likes better than putting him in that sort of situation.

  This Dinard arrangement. Very nice is Dinard, families, dark blue sea, not too many pretty women about, they tend to go south, so not much danger of getting told off because you looked at one of them, like the other evening at Marty’s when Muriel decided she wanted to swap places:

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Because I have no intention of allowing you to spend the whole evening ogling those two tarts sitting behind me.’

  Or during an interval at the Comédie Française:

  ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t see her!’

  In the end he realised that a woman in a trouser-suit had stood next to him when he’d gone to fetch the drinks, she had smiled at him, he’d stepped aside, let her go first and replied to whatever it was she’d said. When he got back with his two bottles and two glasses, he’d had his ear well and truly chewed:

  ‘Henri, if you want, I can go home and leave you here to carry on flirting, I see it’s the mannish type now, she’s flat-chested, go and check for yourself, but I won’t be here when you get back.’

  Dinard, swimming, there’ll be breakers, watching the kites on the beach, there are more and more of them and they get bigger and bigger, a genuine sport now, with proper handgrips, great brutes with a span of three or four metres, forget all this talk of a mole, the kite nose-dives, finds lift just before hitting the sand, climbs whirring up into the sky, the boy standing next to his father, roaring with laughter, the wind, a rip in the canvas red yellow, some kites tear easily, others slip their lines, hurtle down and crash, the laughter too is extinguished, walking along old excisemen’s paths, pass families on the way, see the craziest, the sweetest houses and think sweet thoughts. The most attractive houses belong to the English, large picture windows with blue shutters, there’s also a place that sells pancakes, that has photos of the twenties and thirties in dark brown beaded frames, the front page of a newspaper, also framed, with an article about the resistance in Madrid in 1936, the republicans with one gun for every two men, the article is signed Saint-Exupéry, also photos of a giant seaplane, something de Vèze had dreamed of when he was a boy, a Yankee Clipper, four engines, transatlantic flights in real sleeping berths, Dinard would be good, long walks, the waves crashing on the rocks.

  Sometimes a squall there can be frightening, the air makes you dizzy, within moments you can’t see the houses, the path is on a grassy slope, when a strong gust of wind comes along sometimes you have to sit down and hang on to a gorse bush, you don’t have to but you never know, it can last a quarter of an hour, she nestles into my shoulder, her arms are around my waist, then we go on with our walk, I look at the gorse, I must take up botany again, then dinner for two, let Muriel choose for them both from the menu:

  ‘Guess what I’d like.’

  She’d answer:

  ‘Oh, I know what you like.’

  She would be terrifyingly tender, four days, don’t suggest making it a week, say four days, maybe you could add a fifth at the last minute, days without braces or incident, until it’s time to come back, which she doesn’t like.

  And instead of that, the strutting cockerel, Colonel Berthier, to be precise, but still in civvies.

  That’s why, two days ago at a reception, Maurice and Jacques told de Vèze:

  ‘They promised you wouldn’t make difficulties.’

  Jacques added:

  ‘Augustin, don’t be daft!’

  Augustin, his code name, a ridiculous name now but when he was young all the boys had wanted to be called Augustin, and all the girls dreamed of being Yvonne and smiling at some Augustin, that was when they were between thirteen and seventeen, in the Sologne, Jacques took him to one side leaving Maurice, who looked like a neurotic poodle, talking to the widow of a marshal.

  Jacques with a mocking, snide smile:

  ‘Get that Maurice, what a card, he’s only trying to pick her up,’ then Jacques added with a laugh, as if he were telling a very funny joke, ‘and you can stop sleeping around, or do it with just the one, two at most, like me, but not in Moscow, you’ll end up making enemies, some day you’ll wake up with a great big bullet hole in the back.’

  De Vèze did not care for that.

  The Foreign Minister has almost stopped drivelling on, de Vèze has more or less understood, he has vaguely registere
d that he doesn’t disagree, but that’s as far as he’ll go, stay calm, never react when you’re riled, if you do react when you’re riled remember that they’ll have anticipated your reaction, smile disdainfully, show that you’re treating this like a kid’s game in a sandpit, as long as none of this gets in the way of your doing your job, say you’ll complete your mission, the Minister replies, oh we’ve all got a mission, like hell we have, your mission as a minister is given to you by some Lady Piddle, you think you’re Choiseul and Briand rolled into one, and you toddle off to some garret in the Élysée and report to a grey mouse who gives you orders, and you call that a mission, you’ve never known what a mission was, ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’

  De Vèze, you lead, Koenig’s orders had a certain panache. The meeting’s over, the Minister stands up, he’s getting a paunch, he tightens his belt a notch, he tries to lighten the atmosphere, he fiddles with his glasses, puts one hand on the plumber’s shoulder and says laddishly:

  ‘Henri, Colonel Berthier here is fully authorised to act, he could even make you turn out your trouser pockets if he wanted.’

  Moron, a whisker away from a smack in the mouth. You didn’t react, you’ve become like them, it’s just like the devious oddball with the big, funny ears, like radar dishes, who’d been right in 1965, in Singapore:

  ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’

  A large villa on a hill above the Strait of Singapore, a very attractive colonial villa like you get in the novels of Conrad, British Imperial Style, long-fronted, single-storey, façade a series of large dominos made of black and white panels, against a green background of tropical trees, they were in the garden, de Vèze, Poirgade, the joker with big ears, the French Consul at Singapore, his wife, a few guests, they were all waiting for the arrival of a man whom de Vèze had always admired.

  You couldn’t really say it had all begun at Singapore, though for de Vèze Singapore was beginning to have a portentous feel to it, but he also remembers something else that was said that evening, a comment aimed at Scapin, he of the big ears, by another guest, he couldn’t say which now, it was intended to provoke, maybe it was Poirgade:

  ‘No, not altogether buggered, just not a sure bet any more.’

  *

  Once again you’ve made the journey from Paris to the Waldhaus to meet up with Lilstein. A great many things have changed since you were a young Parisian making your first trip in 1956 and especially since the later one: in 1972 you became the general secretary of the annual Waltenberg Forum which welcomed you as a French intellectual, a Cartesian and Pyrrhonist who could be relied on to make the intellectual fur fly.

  The Forum was a prestigious meeting of thinkers, politicians, top businessmen and economists. On the lines of what had already been done here in the inter-war years, the focus was on finding a principle of action, on being absolutely modern, you are accused of‘giving your allegiance to capitalism’, you say it’s quite true, and you proceed to defend capitalism.

  In all this the crucial thing is to remember that in order to come here you no longer need to pretend to go to Lucerne or Zurich and then at the last moment take some meandering mountain railway so that you can meet up with Lilstein, you now have an excellent reason for making the trip: nowadays it’s Lilstein who comes to meet you, he’s the one who takes as many precautions as that fictional master-criminal Fantômas. Berlin, Warsaw, Stockholm, Brussels, Strasbourg, Basle.

  He puts it about that he’s a cousin of the hôtelière, from Alsace, he always gives the impression of being up to something louche, as if he were her lover, he’s fatter, he has a beard, looks older, eventually he admitted that his father was a theatre director, very well known in the twenties, it makes you laugh every trip, it’s an age since you met in the great lounge, you each have your habits, the privileges of the old and valued customer, the hôtelière was considerate enough to take a few of the painted plates you like from the dresser and hang them on the walls of the suite which she now keeps permanently for you, the two big ones in particular, on the phone Lilstein says:

  ‘Ready or not I’m coming, young gentleman of France!’

  You are twenty years older than when he first called you that, but he often still does. Now he bursts through a trap-door in the wall of your cupboard laughing, holding two helpings of Linzer on a plate.

  ‘I come from the lower depths, from the bowels of the earth, like Punch but without the stick, like Harlequin, and I come bearing the best tart in the world.’

  You laugh with him, he looks around your suite and adds:

  ‘These are what we call “conspiring rooms”.’

  You laugh when Lilstein laughs but today you’ve started to feel scared, Paris is making big waves, you’ve even been told that de Vèze, the Ambassador, was being watched, you don’t mind that, but you do wonder if this time there mightn’t be someone taking an interest in you, you’d rather like to stay at Waltenberg, Switzerland does not extradite, still perhaps not, what would it amount to, spending your last years at the Waldhaus stuck between the spectacle of the Grisons and a view of a couple of painted plates? You watch the man with the slow movements who has just sat down facing you, it’s Lilstein of course, but each time you see him again he strikes you first as the man with the slow movements, it takes you a moment before you get his name firmly placed again, you can’t be afraid in this superb suite at the Waldhaus, it’s not possible, you begin to calm down and Lilstein looks at you with a weary smile:

  ‘Do you realise it’s the twenty-second anniversary of our first meeting?’

  You say what’s an anniversary to me, add that you are more and more uncomfortable in Paris where you feel you’re suffocating, you have this sense that a huge net has been cast and that you are about to be trapped in it, you can’t feel anything yet but you are quite sure you’re caught up in it, and all Lilstein has to say is:

  ‘Jesters doing somersaults, it’s the bells on their hats!’

  Elsewhere whole networks are collapsing, large numbers of Soviets are going over to the West, as are some people from the GDR, not that many, but the ones who defect have a great deal to say, too much for your liking, and Germans are obsessed with index-cards and archives. If just one of Lilstein’s archivists took a fancy to visit the Americans or merely his cousins in Bonn, your goose would be cooked.

  ‘Quite,’ says Lilstein, ‘but we mustn’t let that allow our Linzer to get cold, the only thing I’m certain of these days is that this is the twenty-second anniversary of our first meeting and that we’re eating Linzer, not Sacher, praise the Lord! You don’t know what the Sacher variety is?

  ‘Sacher Torte is quite different, my boy, a Genoese pastry, a totally fraudulent reputation, chocolate and apricot jam, it’s soft, gooey, whenever I’ve had to swallow a mouthful I’ve felt it had already been chewed by someone else, whereas this Linzer is as exceptional as ever, the jam is unctuous, the shortcrust pastry fights back exquisitely, as ever, and this time it again exudes a whiff of rum, do you remember? The hotelier’s wife added rum once before, a long time ago, it doesn’t make us any younger, did it never occur to you to wonder why, you might have guessed, do you want to know now? Think, it’s simple, rum, a liquid, that means that the cook didn’t use raw yolks but the yolks of hard-boiled eggs.

  ‘Why? So that the pastry would be even more crumbly, but since a modicum of liquid is required and the yolks are hard, she added a spoonful of rum to the flour and butter before mixing, one spoonful, no more, just a splash, marvellous, at least the Linzer hasn’t changed, not like everything else, are you really nervous? You know, speaking for myself, I’m more than nervous, I’m sad, melancholic, this may well be the last time we’ll ever eat Linzer together, something I didn’t fully realise when I got here, I went for a short stroll, as I always do, as far as the village before taking the cable car up here, for once I’d given myself enough time to construct a little hide, I wanted to see one of those lovely little rodents who suddenly panic when they realise h
ow visible they are against all that snow.

  ‘But I didn’t see anything, or rather I saw the mechanical shovels and the bulldozers, Waltenberg is expanding, a heliport, it’s an obscenity! For an annual Forum? The forums have always managed quite well without a heliport, as general secretary of the annual forum you could have lodged an objection, I’m joking, of course I know that was out of the question, and just as well they got their heliport, even more high-flying participants, more informal discussions, more data, a better return, an even more profitable undertaking, considerable productivity gains in information output, you see I’m up with modern economic thinking and the ethos of your Forum, but no matter, I’m still saddened, those bulldozers! That was when I realised how melancholy I’d got and that Waltenberg wouldn’t lift my spirits, I look out at the Rikshorn through the window, and I feel absolutely nothing!

  ‘There are too many jokers now, and as for us, we were the minders but we’re turning into jokers, with one small difference between the two of us, which is that in my country they still shoot clowns, but it isn’t the risk that depresses me, besides you run no risk whatsoever, from the start there never were any records, I told you, nothing written down, so there never was a records clerk filing everything we got up to, I never found any reason to write things down in black and white, that way no defector can turn you in, except for me, that’s a joke, and if it proves necessary we’ll stop meeting here, I won’t come any more, you will say what you have to say directly to our hostess here, she’ll pass it on, it’s all very sad.’

  And Lilstein adds something more depressing than sadness, more depressing than your fear, something which at a stroke cancels out all the reasons you still have for confronting depression and fear:

  ‘I think, young gentleman of France, that we probably no longer serve any purpose. If I say “probably”, it’s merely out of consideration for you, in truth there is no “probably” about it.’