Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  ‘And how’s the papyrus today, Madame Cramilly? You know, we water it too, regularly.’

  ‘Ah, how kind. But it’s not enough, you know.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, last week, I couldn’t understand it, it was swimming in water, plenty of light, all it needed to thrive, the watering rota is fine, very well organised, but last week it started to droop, looked limp and drab, though it was swimming in water, but I spoke to it for longer than usual, the flowers perked up, it must have been depressed, papyruses must get depressed too, I’m like you, I find it hard to believe, but can you see any other explanation when everything is as it should be, water, the rota, and the papyrus starts to wither, then I talk to it and its lovely flowers brighten up again?’

  Anyway until Berthier arrived, the papyrus had flourished, thanks to the watering rota in which all departments participated, plus Madame Cramilly’s little chats, but now Madame Cramilly has lost heart, she no longer talks to the papyrus on the second floor, she doesn’t dare walk up the stairs to water it, and no one does it in her stead, and certainly not Berthier, so with each passing day the papyrus is an increasingly sorry sight, and people have stopped speaking to each other, you know human beings, they have to talk, even Madame Cramilly, she even feels like talking to Berthier who is preventing people from talking to each other, if she talks to him, he’ll go away and she can get back to normal and start talking to her papyrus again.

  *

  Lilstein has aged, we all get older, but for such a long time now you have thought of him as impervious to change, those clear eyes, the pale skin, he is tall, he used to hold himself very straight. Today, in your room at the Waldhaus, he slumps, there is less of him above the table, his shoulders have dropped, his eyes are dull, and he snaps:

  ‘We no longer serve a useful purpose, young gentleman of France, our trade has become a melancholy one.’

  Lilstein’s hands dither, uncertain of what gestures to make, he syllogises, he rewrites history, he goes back ten years, he wants so much to be wrong, he struggles with a morsel of tart which refuses to be cut up with his small spoon, he gives up, points the spoon at you and says:

  ‘Ten years ago, we fought against a stupid war in Vietnam, against the hawks who waved the star-spangled banner, it was a fine thing to do, and today in my camp there are fools waving the red flag who’d also love to have a war, one of their own, in the east, they’re not proper soldiers or real politicians or even genuine fools.

  ‘Shakespeare’s fools have bells and a cap like a cock’s crest, but there’s great sense in their folly, they say “if you do not smile the way the wind blows you’ll soon catch cold” or “let go when the great wheel rolls down the hill lest it break your neck”.

  ‘My fools are cretinous apparatchiks, high-hat Russians, Marxists who are still not done with the faith, holy writ, orthodoxy, they want to play at war, a real war, in some small country, far away, to close up the ranks and revive the faith, and in my part of the world, East Berlin as you call it, there are other cretins who give their backing to the dim comrades in Moscow, patriotic faith dressed up as a “proletarian intervention”, imagine, one of them had the nerve to tell me that “proletarian intervention” is a “scientifically sacred” task, I’m still reeling with the shock of it, the same mistake as the Americans made, squared.’

  Lilstein looks out towards the Rikshorn and gives a sigh:

  ‘“Scientifically sacred”! That’s going to cost us very dear. In Vietnam, we put an end to one war, now they’re about to start another, in Afghanistan, perhaps it should be my turn now to give you information but I’m not sure if we could prevent this one, they’ve just appointed a new Minister for me to answer to, an oaf, dimmer than any I’ve had before, he’s never seen a shot fired in anger, knows nothing about suffering or culture, he’s one of Stalin’s old informers, very interesting the career paths of those snitches, I wangled a seat for one of them in the Bonn government, and given what I can do with him, I’m not keen on having somebody else as Minister.

  ‘But in Paris you too are scared of being the victim of an informer, I’m trying to put your mind at rest, but did you know that in Paris a list has been drawn up of seven hundred names and that yours is on it? Don’t worry, it also contains dozens of ambassadors, prefects, ministers and former ministers, eat up, your tart’s getting cold, you’ll miss the aromas. Even the proprietor of Paris-Match is on the list as is the owner of Détective magazine, that says how serious it is! All the same, you are ready to jump ship and so am I, we’re both in the process of having our Great Adventure shot from under us, they’re going to win, they’ve set a woman on our trail, with a couple of eager blood-hounds, you can’t get a decent dessert spoon anywhere, and here am I bewailing my lot, like a cat on hot cinders, that woman won’t find anything but she’s going to make the atmosphere unbreathable.’

  Lilstein has resumed his tussle with his portion of tart, when he manages to cut it he ends up with pieces that are too small, he turns to you and complains:

  ‘What’s required is a spoon with a longer handle, for better leverage and more pressure, to help cut pieces from the slice, and one side of the spoon should be serrated, a kind of dessert spoon specifically designed for short-crust and puff pastry, otherwise we’ll be like everybody else, have to eat with our fingers, one ritual fewer and one barbarism more, we do good work, but we do it for masters who don’t deserve us, take mine: my first boss in the GDR, a weak and vindictive sort, and further down the line, yonder in the land of the bears, a second, master of all he surveyed, old, pot-bellied, you know he had himself appointed Marshal of the Soviet Union? And was awarded the Lenin Prize for Literature! Makes you feel sorry for Russian literature! Tolstoy, Gorky, Brezhnev, come one come all! Fortunately there are also Pasternak, and Solzhenitzyn, as you see I have tastes of my own. The old man, with his big belly, ensconced in the Kremlin, he spends his time arranging his medals in rows on his chest, he’s got the medals already and would very much like to have his own war, in Afghanistan!

  ‘But you also have two masters, one’s in the Élysée Palace, a vain clucking peahen, doesn’t bother much with medals, he worries about his baldness and his accordion, and such vanity, very touchy because he knows that in the long run he’ll always have to kow-tow to a peanut farmer on the other side of the Atlantic.

  ‘Even if we passed information to Mr Vanity in the Élysée, I haven’t a clue what he would do with it, he could use it to put a spoke in the peanut farmer’s wheel instead of giving him a helping hand, indeed he could, your chief has a lot of problems just now, because of us, we’re working too well, the Americans are getting riled, we’re really working well, but I don’t know what we’re doing any more, and here I am, no smarter than before.

  ‘And no smarter than a fool, you remember, in 1956,1 told you that we were going to work to let in the light, a rather portentous turn of phrase but there’s always been a touch of that in the way I understood my role in spreading Aufklärung, and today I find it hard to see where the smallest glimmer of light would come from, I’d forgotten one thing though, wherever there is a lot of light, there is also deep shadow and that can be worse, a story about the death of Goethe: a play on words, on his deathbed the great man didn’t say, as reported, mehr Licht, ‘more light’, but mehr Nicht, ‘more nothing’, I was a man of the Enlightenment and I produced more nothing.

  ‘What information could I pass to your chief, dear boy? What would be the point? Our trade no longer serves a useful purpose, but listen, if your President were to forward a couple of choice details about Afghanistan to the Americans, it would calm them down and maybe call some of the dogs off us.’

  *

  No, in the Embassy people didn’t start talking again overnight, and there’s talking and talking, one word, two, a sigh, nothing definite, but as the days turn into weeks, Bantam Bum who had required people to talk to him has stopped asking, he no longer leans on people, is not so aggressive,
sometimes he looks discouraged, stooped, human, not that long ago people would gladly have pushed him and his ball point with four colours down the stairwell, but now, just because the days have turned into weeks which have ticked by, when Berthier sits down yet again to question someone he looks so weary, so shrunken, that you throw up your hands then let them fall on your desktop saying: what do you want me to say?

  Nobody tells him anything, they just ask one question: what do you want me to say? They ask it so that he understands that the answer is ‘nothing’, so that he will go away, but at the same time the question you think you’re asking him you are also putting to yourself.

  It’s just what people need to make them start talking, not a question that you asked to be put, you don’t answer that one, you have your pride, especially when the person asking it walks like a bantam cock, no, the real question, which is the one you ask yourself when you put it to Berthier: what do you want me to say? You put it to him so that in the end he’s forced to answer ‘nothing’. But you’ve also put this question to yourself, and you’ve got to find an answer, and neither the word ‘nothing’ nor any amount of generalities will do, your self-respect requires you to come up with an answer that is true, and confronted by Berthier you start to answer your own question with generalities some of which are more specific than others.

  Besides Berthier isn’t that bad, for example, he didn’t report the naval attache, the aircraft carrier pilot who thought he was a piece of shit, or Mazet over the business of the biro and his records, no, Berthier understood certain things, and among the people who said that there were some things that he understood are some who said afterwards that if all this hoo-ha about a mole is true, then you need a lot of people to smoke him out, dirty work maybe but it has to be done, and to catch big fish you’ve got to get your arse wet, it’s not about denouncing, Berthier actually loathed denunciation, he’d said so to two or three people, what he needed were pointers, generalities, some but not all needing to be more specific than others.

  So that’s where we stood, right, with ‘generalities some of which are more specific than others’, some generalities might give him a lead, he had packed up his questionnaire, now he seemed to be asking for help, he chatted, he still said he was ‘extremely sorry’ but did so without the earlier emphasis or menace, in the end he’d even put his four-spangled ball-point away, and when he was sitting, face drawn, eyes blank, he seemed to encapsulate the misery of a servant in a house facing ruin. He was becoming human.

  People began to speak politely to Berthier, to chat, no one had cause to complain. The naval attaché had left on scheduled leave; on the second floor people had resumed watering the papyrus, the ends of its leaves had stopped turning brown, that truly stunning gold-brown that appears on the tips of the green leaves, but it’s a deadly sign, the papyrus is a hardy plant but at the first hint of drought it dies.

  And Madame Cramilly? No one had noticed if she’d started talking to the papyrus again, but it was likely that she was thinking about it, she seemed to be scared of Berthier but she always seemed to be bumping into him, she said hello, oh yes, people had started saying hello again, they were physically in Moscow, but they were among French people and living under French law! A guilty person was being hunted, but not ruthlessly, no one was being liquidated, so different from what the Ivans would do in the same circumstances. In the French Embassy the only thing liquidated was vanity, people spoke of this and that and reached an accommodation with their consciences. Until such time as consciences would become quite shameless.

  And this included even Madame Cramilly, she had probably not started talking to the papyrus again but she now tried to talk to Berthier, scared though she was, she had already spoken to him, on two occasions, the second time at her behest, it lasted two hours, and subsequently it seemed that he was avoiding her and she was running after him, jokes were made about Berthier being harassed by an old lady who kept pestering him for another big session to go over important points.

  What did Madame Cramilly look like? she looked like the old lady in Babar the Elephant, exactly like the old lady in Babar, small, a matchstick, thin lips, grey bun and pointy nose, no, she didn’t wear a shawl over her shoulders, at least not at the office, a straight dark dress, cream collar, no jewellery, Berthier avoided her, but the old lady from Babar refused to let up, she had information of the greatest importance to give him, information that came from a very confidential source, she must have talked to Berthier about it once, he avoided her the way we seek to escape the agreeable and persistent caricature of ourselves that we all carry in our heads.

  Sometimes Berthier looked happy, human. Had he discovered something?

  Yes, a face in the carpet, or a pair of rabbit’s ears in the shrubbery, things which vanish when you change the angle and stubbornly stay wool or leaves, he didn’t discover anything at all but in the end he knew everything about everybody.

  Only de Vèze had refused to talk to him.

  ‘Her name is Vassilissa,’ Berthier had informed him bluntly, ‘and she’s playing you for a fool.’

  Berthier also went looking for hidden microphones, he tapped all the walls, he talked to himself in a whisper, affectionately you might say, he spoke vacantly to some person, to the furniture or his screwdriver, like Madame Cramilly and her papyrus, but the words weren’t the same, do it for me, come on, be good, bitch, a whisper, a pointer, a lead, shit, he fenced with his screwdriver, do it for me, and his voice rose as he got to the last word, to ‘me’, grew almost strident, more so than when he’d been ‘sorreee’, then he started taking two-hundred-year-old items of furniture apart with a screwdriver, a hammer and the frenzy of the deranged, he started getting edgy with people again, he reverted to his previous vicious form as a persecutor of the innocent.

  None of this discouraged Madame Cramilly, she was determined to have her long talk and seemed to know at any given moment on what floor Berthier happened to be, along which corridor he would pass, and she would lie in wait for him, she asked for that serious talk about important matters, or else when their paths crossed she said nothing but looked him straight in the eye to make sure he didn’t forget that by refusing to talk to her he was committing a professional mistake.

  At other times she would walk behind him without his being aware of it, and when he realised she was there he would scowl, though he never succeeded in putting her off.

  True enough, people began to tease Berthier, they’d say ‘good morning, Madame Cramilly’ when they saw him coming down the corridor, to make him believe that she was behind him, it got so he no longer dared go up to the second floor and the papyrus, so the second floor became a haven for relaxed conversation, as someone remarked one day:

  ‘1 don’t know if the papyrus really talks or if it’s worth spending time trying to talk to it in private, but at least it allows us to chat among ourselves.’

  So Berthier changed tactics, increasingly he would hole up in the wretched little room that de Vèze had allocated him, no window, only a sort of horizontal slit with a pane of frosted glass over it which didn’t open, and when Berthier summoned a suspect to his rat hole, the suspect began by commiserating, it’s grim in here, couldn’t you get anywhere better than this? it’s like being shut up in a cupboard.

  He never responded, he would let the suspect score a point, sit down at a roll-top desk which must have dated from the 1930s, so that the suspect sitting across from him could see only the outside of the lid which Berthier opened after a few minutes, it was not possible for the suspect to see what there was inside.

  With an ordinary desk, when you enter an office, you can see what’s lying about on it, but not with a roll-top, Berthier would glance at intervals inside his desk and then look up at the suspect with his empty eyes, of course there wasn’t anything in it, or maybe just an empty file, or the CV of an irreproachable civil servant, a few notes about the suspect from Intelligence, ‘the concierge reports that…’

  And B
erthier would look into his desk like some small-time cop in a cheap detective novel, nothing to get nervous about, he could just as easily have left a file with the suspect’s name on it lying around on his desk. All phoney.

  Finally, he’d close his small-time cop’s roll-top desk with a screech of slats made of old, dry wood, and too bad if all he had to go on were the few months that such or such a suspect had moved, at the age of nineteen, within the sphere of influence, as the expression has it, of the Communist Students Association, ‘within the sphere of influence’ because he’d never had a card, for someone had told the suspect that you should never sign up officially for any communist organisation, it leaves a permanent blot on your record.

  The suspect had got a card under a false name, but he’d never trusted the secretary of the branch who had issued the card, a Stalinist, when the suspect had raised the matter of records the branch secretary had said ‘no, in our records there are only aliases’, and smiled, and in that smile the suspect thought he read contempt for his chicken-hearted petty bourgeois fears whereas what he saw was most probably the hypocrisy of the secretary who knew for certain that real names were also entered in the records, but in those days it was himself that the suspect did not trust and he’d been convinced that the branch secretary was sneering at him.

  What had Berthier got in his roll-top desk? a note claiming that the suspect was once a sympathiser of the Union of Communist Students? Or a photocopy of the stub of his membership card, with both names on it, the alias and the real one? That was all a long time ago, the branch secretary who had enrolled the suspect as a member of the Communist Students was also a member of the Party, he was highly respected among the students, small voice, small build, small glasses, a tireless worker, destined one day to be a famous linguist, he’d been to a Congress of World Youth in the Ukraine and had come back with a small jar containing tchernoziom, that black earth so full of promise.