by Hedi Kaddour
*
Berthier, Colonel Berthier, no first name, career launched by nabbing a traitor in the HQ of French Forces in Germany, following which he had swept France’s Embassy in Rome clean of all the bugs which the Russians had accumulated there.
One morning, Lady Piddle had summoned him to her garret in the Élysée together with the Army Minister, she had told him in the presence of the Minister that from then on he would answer only to her.
A few days after the interview in the Minister’s office in the Quai d’Orsay, Berthier stepped out of de Vèze’s diplomatic bag and into the French Embassy in Moscow, he went wherever and whenever he wanted, sometimes he ordered the occupants out but most often he locked himself in with them, he was ‘extremely sorry’ but ‘all the clocks had to be reset’.
He said ‘extremely sorry’ with a measurable emphasis on the last syllable, drawing out the ‘ry’, speaking through his nose for the fraction of a second it took to say it, an edgy drawl, an indication that the syllable could well blow up in their faces if the man who talked like that did not get answers to his questions right away.
And in the way he emphasised the end of the word ‘sorry’ there was a hint of latent, uncontrollable, vicious energy which was only biding its time before being unleashed from the restraints of common politeness and threatened the worst if Berthier were not helped as quickly as possible to stop him feeling so ‘sorreee’, such a polite word and ordinarily rendered anodyne because it figured so prominently in everyday speech, but in that edgy drawl it now regained the violence it once contained centuries ago when words meant what they said, when a man who told you he was ‘sorry’ was expressing the full extent of the ‘sorrow’ caused by the unhappy condition to which you had reduced him and at the same time gave him the power and the right to have you garrotted.
Berthier also used a thirty-page questionnaire and a ball-point pen in four colours, he spent his time clicking it, waited for the irritated reaction of people who can’t stand hearing a ball-point pen being clicked, but no one dared tell him to stop. No, someone did, once: someone dared and had been told by Berthier that he seemed nervous.
And someone else had pulled a stunt, Mazet, in despatches, unimaginative sort, in a group meeting, fit of the giggles, every time Berthier clicked his four colours, Mazet did the same with his while looking at him innocently in the eye.
Berthier didn’t stop, nor did Mazet, hence the fit of the giggles which convulsed the others, for a few days clicking ball-points was all the rage, Mazet became a star, eye more alert, voice stronger, and then Berthier told Mazet that there were irregularities in his records and took them away and kept them for three days. Mazet went back to being unimaginative.
Berthier went round repeating:
‘The clocks are being reset, all the clocks.’
He was curt with the men, polite with the women. When he spoke to the women, he looked to one side, he became the major topic of conversation in the Ladies on the second floor, I’m telling you he isn’t normal, got these cold eyes, everything about him is cold, he’s asexual, I don’t know about that, I haven’t bothered to look that hard, and I shan’t neither will you and that’s a fact, you’re just saying that, keep your hair on I was only joking, anyway it doesn’t entitle him to walk into the Ladies without knocking, yes it does, he’s already done it, twice at least, he did it yesterday, not here, on the third floor, oh excuse me he says but he barges in all the same! Into our toilets!
The nickname ‘Bantam Bum’ went round the Embassy like wildfire in competition with ‘Lofty’.
One day Berthier claimed to have found traces of cocaine in the offices of the military attachés, these officers were minded ‘to sock him on the jaw to teach him a lesson’, they hadn’t fought in the Algerian War to be treated like this, but not the naval attaché, he didn’t mention Algeria, instead he stepped out into the corridor and yelled yes, I’m an addict, hooked on kerosene, drugs, treachery, I’ve got a secret to sell to fund my kerosene habit, two thousand seven hundred and twenty-two landings on French aircraft carriers, day, night, all weathers, it’s a military secret, for sale to the Ivans, know this: French aircraft carriers are crap! the pilots on French aircraft carriers are crap! because they’re all treated like crap! I’m going to tell the Ivans!’
Berthier asked for a dog, an Alsatian, to be sent from Paris.
‘Just because you can’t find anything doesn’t mean you can do whatever you like,’ protested de Vèze.
The way Bantam Bum went about his assignment even roused in de Vèze a certain fellow-feeling for the mole he was hunting, it must be priceless to be the mole and have daily dealings with the Bantam, a real hoot knowing you’re running rings round him, you’re facing this short-arsed nosy cop, he can send you to jail for ever and a day or even have you eliminated, and you’re running rings round him, you’re like a man sentenced to death who has managed to make off with the blade of the guillotine. Or rather you’re like the invisible man, though you have an advantage over the invisible man, the invisible man is only invisible, he can see but runs no risk, that’s all right for snotty-nosed boys, but a spy is visible and present, when people deal with him they think he’s another person altogether, he makes that other person smile, a broad smile which dissembles his dissembling, he feels genuinely excited inside, you smile at people who are hunting you down to eliminate you, the tanks were hunting us too, we weren’t smiling then, not a lot, but we were spying on them, we’d felt the same way when we were in our fox-holes, in the shale of the desert, waiting for the tank to drive over the top of us, so we could take him from the rear, a grenade lobbed from behind, a gap in the turret, the panzer was only vulnerable in two places, and when you managed to get one of them you could afford to smile, but sitting there in the hole while the great brute passed over without seeing you, that gave you a strange feeling, the effect was like some powerful drug.
The mole must feel like that, he – or she – lets Berthier walk past without seeing a thing, all the fun of an ambush, the mole cracks up when he sees Berthier at work. And de Vèze, pulling Berthier up short, ‘just because you can’t find anything doesn’t mean you can do whatever you like’, has the feeling that he’s playing the mole’s game, and the mole knows the game inside out.
De Vèze did not speak up too strongly for his military attaches, he’d never got on particularly well with them, they were drunks happy to be in Russia, the Alsatian finally arrives, he was called Baby, sleek black and tan coat, forty kilos of aggression, trained the hard way, he cocked his leg against the furniture, three drops each time as a marker, he sniffed around, marked, then sniffed some more. He was on the prowl.
One morning, he sniffed out a dachshund belonging to one of the officers, the dachshund stood its ground, as it did whenever it encountered a dog on a lead, it barked and stood its ground, Baby didn’t bark, he wasn’t on a lead, he upended the dachshund, he tried to rip its stomach open and the dachshund bit his bits from underneath, even an Alsatian trained the hard way gives his first thought to saving his bits, it was this that saved the dachshund, they were separated and then the Alsatian forgot all about cocaine and his three years of training, all he could think of was finding the dachshund and resuming their discussion, he went sniffing for him everywhere and drooled and peed every time he got a faint whiff of dachshund, at least this raised a laugh, and nobody found any cocaine.
All departments in the Moscow Embassy stood their ground, this isn’t the place where you’ll find traitors, moles winkle their way into your ranks, they’re in counter-espionage like you, take the English, they have counter-spies to spy on spies, you recruit them any old how, Zorros and Pieds Nickelés, and when they’re any good they use their skills to play a double game, even a triple hand, they’re unstable types, here you’ll only find people with traditional loyalties whom you can trust, straight-up people, some of them ram-rod stiff, but no dimwits, complete confidence, I can answer for all my colleagues.
Such solidarity! Wonderful! Berthier fiddled with his quadruple-clicking biro and revived his threatening sorrows, he put up with everything and got nothing, zilch, when he was weary of probing hearts and souls he turned his attention to walls and floors, then began a new round of interviews, but all he got were vague words and generalities.
They’d fob him off with generalities and he would canter off down the corridors on his hobby-horse, his questionnaire, only to be handed more generalities, there are far fewer spies about than people think, true sometimes there’s loose talk, but don’t make a big espionage thing out of the titbits anyone can read in the newspaper and repeat at cocktail parties, those are generalities, we can’t avoid having conversations with the Russians if we want to know what’s going on in Moscow or the country at large, what you’ve got to look at is the bottom line: we know a great deal about what goes on here, we’ve got to be trusted, we are people with traditional loyalties, with a sense of what’s right, when I say ‘we’ I’m talking about people who have made this their career, the tenured staff.
These generalities were intended to make Berthier go to hell, and go away Berthier did, though he stayed within the Embassy, focusing on the non-tenured staff, saying where he’d come from and even which of their colleagues had sent him, or without saying so in so many words but letting the non-tenured staff work out who the bastard could be, because the harder you look the greater the need to believe in what you’re looking for, and there are people who really believed that some bastard had dropped them in it.
Or if they didn’t, they suspected that whoever was winding Berthier up by sending him away to get lost, i.e., in their direction, that someone was taking the piss, and they did the same, but a few of them started half-believing, A, what other people said about them, that they weren’t as trustworthy as they thought, and B, what they themselves said about other people, though nothing ever went beyond the level of generalities, but no one much cared for any of these proceedings.
Berthier was told that his shabby little game would get him nowhere, and it didn’t get him anywhere, a few titbits of gossip, people were above all that sort of thing, absolutely, an acerbic note in the voice, opinions changed about certain individuals of whom no one would ever have believed that they were so, oh, mum’s the word, but we were above all that, we were happy just to pat the ball back, we saw clean through Berthier’s little game and through everybody’s little game, it was all so transparent, we retained our dignity, at least I’m not sleeping with just anybody, I never go out just anywhere, and Berthier starts peeking into the movements of those who do not sleep alone and those who go out, right, though at least you don’t see those people hanging about the Embassy after office hours.
Berthier also questions the ones who stay late at the office, he tells them why he thought of questioning them a second or third time, still no names but a hot potato circulating at an ever increasing speed, keep alert, every man for himself, and not a closed door anywhere, no one dares shut himself up in his office any more, unless it’s Berthier who closes the door, everybody remains on formal terms with everybody else, but no one really speaks to anybody and there are fewer contacts.
No one even dares go round with a hat collecting for a birthday or the rota for watering the indoor plants, so the plants shrivel, they are neglected, especially the papyrus on the second floor, the big one, the one on the landing by the window that needs so much watering, a papyrus in Moscow is not just any old plant, but with water it’s possible, after all its name is ‘feet-in-water’, also a papyrus needs to be talked to, that’s right, even plants need to be talked to, that was the view taken by Madame Cramilly, in the passport office, and by a few others too, including a man in security, but they were less forthright than Madame Cramilly in expressing their opinions in public on the real needs of certain house plants and notably the papyrus.
Besides, Madame Cramilly is not extreme in her views, it’s true she talks to the papyrus, whispers to it while she’s watering it or giving it a helping of the fertiliser which she arranges to have brought in the diplomatic bag, she speaks slowly but no one has ever made out what she says to it, when she’s in a confidential mood she readily admits that she talks to the papyrus but mark this: she’s never said that the papyrus talks back, it’s not a dialogue, mischievous tongues allege that she has conversations with the papyrus, but that’s outright slander, a bit of own-back because a few years ago she refused to contribute to the cost of a coffee machine to be installed in the office of Mademoiselle Legeais, whom she doesn’t like, why her office? Because hers is the biggest, but Mademoiselle Legeais smokes like a man who has just hours to live, the image is admittedly brutal but that’s how she smokes, she lights each cigarette with the previous one except when she intends to remove the filter from a cigarette, in which case she waits, she reckons that everything they say about tobacco is hooey, but that doesn’t stop her waiting. When she has decided to remove the filter from her next cigarette, when she waits, everyone knows that she is going to remove the filter.
Madame Cramilly would never have set foot in her office where, to boot, people talk aimlessly, the coffee machine was a pretty low tactic aimed at Madame Cramilly who would have refused to go anywhere near it, so there is no coffee machine in Mademoiselle Legeais’s office, no machine for making real espresso, a machine that works like the ones you see behind the counters in bars, they have several percolators, they cost a fortune.
At least thirty of you would need to club together, but even with the tax-free advantages of the diplomatic service, even a machine with only two percolators, and there is a really big difference in price between the two- and three-percolator types, the model offering best value-for-money according to Mademoiselle Legeais’s consumer magazine was the one with two percolators, it would have worked with a bit of organisation, actually, that’s wrong, actually it wasn’t too expensive, though you could manage very nicely with two percolators, but faced by the cabal unleashed by La Cramilly it had not been possible to arrange a proper collection, Mademoiselle Legeais had only been able to purchase a machine which used paper filters, and there were already a lot of those in the Embassy, the big model, it’s not exactly dishwater but it sure is no match for the percolator. And ever since then, the Legeais faction has never missed an opportunity to be nasty about Madame Cramilly.
No, Madame Cramilly doesn’t have conversations with the papyrus, she just talks to it, while she waters it, yes, she has also arranged for a watering-can to be sent via the diplomatic bag, with a proper permit naturally, you know, in Moscow, watering-cans are poor quality, they weigh a ton and shoot water in heavy showers which leave holes in the soil and wash the best of it to the bottom, she talks to the papyrus so that it feels good, papyruses are social plants, all the encyclopaedias, all the specialist books on botany say so, and Madame Cramilly has read them all, at least all the chapters devoted to the papyrus, they are social plants, and when you force a papyrus to live in isolation, like the one on the second floor of the Embassy, you have to make it feel that it’s not alone, that someone’s looking out for it, which is why you’ve got to talk to it.
In her dealings with the papyrus, Madame Cramilly does the talking and has always been happy to do the talking, the rest of it, the stories about her having conversations with it, all the guff about Madame Cramilly actually imagining that a papyrus can answer her back, well, it’s slander spread by Mademoiselle Legeais and her clan, they want to make Madame Cramilly look mad, but if they carry on like that it won’t ever happen, everyone knows that papyruses can’t talk, the papyrus has never once thanked Madame Cramilly for her kind words, no, Madame Cramilly is thanked by vibrations, the ones she hears of an evening at home, through the walls, they thank her for talking to the papyrus and taking care of it.
At first, Madame Cramilly hadn’t believed in the vibrations, only in her own voice, and then one day she had made an astral contact when she was with some Muscovite friends, the Kipreievs, a lovely co
uple, both elderly, Madame Kipreiev was very fond of Madame Cramilly, they used to invite her round with a few of their friends, retired people, Madame Cramilly asked for authorisation to accept, séances are very entertaining, one evening, a series of rappings, a spirit came to the Kipreievs’ table, it thanked Madame Cramilly several times but without saying for what.
It was not until six months later, in another round-table séance that the spirit had mentioned the papyrus, and the same spirit came back on another occasion, thanking her again, yes, quiet evenings, a small parlour, a mahogany table and a samovar placed not on the table but on a low chest behind the lady of the house, a most comforting samovar, deliciously pot-bellied, on the table was an embroidered cloth, little cakes still warm when Madame Kipreiev handed them round, aniseed cakes, very nice people who still remembered to hold their cakes over their cups before crumbling them.
Then Madame Kipreiev died, her husband became very depressed, no more evenings, no more rapping, no more spirits, Madame Cramilly continued to talk to the papyrus, she talked to it about the séances she had attended, about the spirit who had spoken to her on its behalf, and about her Moscow friends she now saw no more.
Then one day, not in her office but at home, Madame Cramilly thought she heard the echo of a voice, no rapping this time, not a spirit, a real voice, or an echo, then nothing, and two months later the voice returned, passing as a vibration through the walls of Madame Cramilly’s flat, a clear voice this time, again it spoke of the papyrus and thanked Madame Cramilly, it was a vibration, and the vibration told her many other things. But now, with all this fuss in the Embassy, with all these questions, Madame Cramilly does not dare say anything, she doesn’t even dare walk up to the second floor to speak to her papyrus as she used to, discreetly, but even so, remember, some people still poked gentle fun: