Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  One day, the suspect learned that this sometime Stalinist branch secretary had left the Party to which he had been so attached, he had made his first trip to Peking and when he got back he had worked for six months in the front line of the class war, as a prole in a sardine cannery in Brittany; Prunère, the branch secretary who had become a Maoist was called Prunère, had been ordered to return to Paris, to join the Maoist organisation’s central committee, his dialectical skills being needed in the ideological struggle against revisionism in the French Communist Party.

  In Paris, the comrades could listen to Prunère for hours, fascinated by his dialectical skills, all the grassroots members who pasted and repasted thousands of posters on walls, those who handed out leaflets in the suburbs at six of a morning, those who stuffed newspapers up their lumber-jackets and anoraks as a protection against being beaten up by the lackeys of the bosses and/or revisionism, those who printed their leaflets at night on an old roneo machine which tore the stencils which then had to be retyped, those who helped the peasants get the hay in, or swept up on factory floors. You over there, go and dig in!

  And You over there duly dropped out of his second year at law school to hump breeze blocks on a building site or can sardines, those who suddenly abandoned their studies when ordered to, so that they could meet the proletariat, they were all fascinated by the dialectical skills of Prunère, the Stalinist-turned-Maoist, and as the great work proceeded of sticking up posters, handing out leaflets, being smashed over the head, getting the hay in, and of wheelbarrows full of breeze blocks being trundled by the grassroot membership, Prunère the Maoist rose up through the ranks of the organisation.

  The more the comrades put themselves about, the better Prunère was able to speak on their behalf at a senior level in the hierarchy, he had himself worked in a sardine factory, not for ten years like the others, just for six months, but it had been enough for him to acquire the kind of proletarian experience the organisation needed, he’d returned to Paris, on an even higher rung, he played a fundamental role in the ‘revolutionary vigil’ while carrying on with his university studies, he drew up documents containing charges designed to confound the forces of revisionism, both the objective revisionists and the bogus objectively bourgeois revisionists, he kept an eye on the proponents of autocriticism, and maintained the thought of Chairman Mao Tse Tung in all its purity.

  One evening during a meeting devoted to maintaining the purity of the thought of Mao Tse Tung, Prunère singled out one comrade and demanded that she be sent away for a spell of manual labour at Noeux-les-Mines and then told another he should go and do likewise at Carmaux, now everyone knew that those two comrades were living together, he accepted but she kicked up a fuss, she was a sociologist specialising in the mechanism of the exploitation of the proletariat, a girl of solidly middle-class background, comrade Prunère accused her of continuing to exploit the proletariat she claimed to be defending, she then launched into a piece of very elaborate argumentation.

  She said that by making a career in their revolutionary organisation Prunère was exploiting the work of grassroots militants, that if he was able to pursue a career therein as a permanent officer in it he did so on the back of the thousands of hours which the militants gave freely in the service of the organisation, all Prunère needed to do was say that her socialism was ‘narrow and blinkered’ to end the argument and, since the sociological comrade had quoted the work of a number of Yankee pseudo-scholars in her erroneous thesis, she was excluded without further discussion. The motion to exclude her was drafted by the comrade who was living with her.

  The stub of the membership card carried only the alias, that was standard practice in those days, so Berthier has got zilch, but what about that little matter of the hashish when the suspect was working in Morocco, but his Moroccan friend, a colonel in the gendarmerie, had hushed it up, two hundred grams, not worth bothering about, but don’t be so stupid in future, surely you know that the kids who sell the stuff by the side of the road are in cahoots with the gendarmes just a kilometre further on, if you must smoke, come along to the house, the family are away, everyone will be having a good time, there’ll be dancing girls from the village, but bring some good cognac and some Havanas, I prefer them.

  Berthier has got nothing on the suspect, the suspect isn’t actually a suspect, but all the same the suspect searches through his suspect’s memory, an over-payment of salary which he’d never reported, that business of the cheque that had almost landed him in it, so that in the end the roll-top can contain many, many things, and everybody appeared for a second time before Berthier and his desk, a stack of secrets, whether inside the roll-top or not, and a large number of suspects, a car which had been in an accident and had been sold on without full details being divulged to the buyer, a large sum which had been omitted from an income-tax return, a bank account at Klosters or Lucerne, because Geneva is for small-fry, two or three stupid letters written to friends who had sought asylum in Franco’s Spain although you never shared their opinions about French Algeria, a gambling debt paid late, now that could cost you dear, a couple of days spent in Vienna with that Polish guy, true you’d never seen him again but you’d never reported it, a Pole or a Romanian girl, that could turn out expensive too.

  Brother Berthier wasn’t even in a proper office, he occupied a cupboard, without a proper window and without any form of heating.

  ‘That’ll teach him,’ de Vèze had said.

  Berthier couldn’t care less, he’s the one doing the teaching, he keeps his parka on, and he blows hot and cold on tenured colleagues and fixed-term staff, the civilians, the uniformed, the wise, the devious, the weak and the proud, his strength lies not in knowing people’s secrets but in his success in convincing them that they have secrets from him, and they’ve always known that it’s not right, Berthier waits, he lets the suspects sort through their secrets all by themselves.

  *

  In the Waldhaus you listen to Lilstein, he’s not wrong, he repeats, ‘we no longer serve a useful purpose, young gentleman of France’, you’d better listen, call a halt to the whole thing, no records, no records clerk, if what he says is true you’re in the clear, you’ve been playing this dangerous game for more than twenty years, you could get out now, without a scratch, you could go on living in Paris, meeting whoever you like and not have a worry in the world.

  What does worry you is that Lilstein looks a broken man, his word was ‘melancholy’, but you’ve never seen him like this, if he doesn’t stop, he’ll end up clinically depressed, and then one day he’ll say ‘the hell with it’ or something similar, and he’ll throw his hand in for all the world to see, it would be to your advantage to anticipate events, to go over to the other side and be the one who turned first.

  Are you going to betray Lilstein? He’s never put you in any danger, you don’t betray someone just on impulse, there’s a small matter of honour, and beyond the matter of honour there’s this: if you do go over to the other side, what baggage will you take with you?

  If you have nothing of value to pack, it means at best fifteen years in a cell in the Santé prison, and everything you’ve done up to now will have been meaningless, it’ll be your turn to be depressed, but here’s the worst irony in this whole mess: you’re about to shut up shop at the very time when at last Lilstein hands you a right royal scoop: Afghanistan. You remember your old pact: ‘we’ll be equals’, Lilstein had said on that very first day.

  Nor is Lilstein wrong in what he says about your respective masters, going on what you know of your President he’ll give the Russians a free hand and carry on playing his accordion in the Élysée.

  So all you need do is use Lilstein’s information to force your President to take a tougher line with the Russians, he wouldn’t be able to just let them get on with it any more, that would make him look as if he didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation, if he is given information or advice which will encourage him to be firm, he can’t then say that it’s al
l come as a surprise to him, and he’ll relay it to the Americans, and the Americans will be pleased with France and her President, a win-win situation, you already stopped one war with the information you passed on.

  No, that’s not megalomania, Lilstein gave you the exact figure for American losses in Vietnam, no one knew it, you were given the real figure before even the American President got it, and you passed it on keeping everything low key, and now you’re going to stop another war with the information you are about to receive. This time it’ll be the French telling the Americans: ‘the Russians are going to invade Afghanistan.’ Ties of friendship renewed with Washington.

  You don’t need to stand on a platform or chant ‘Stop the cannon! No to machine guns!’, that sort of thing never served any useful purpose, you say nothing, you eat Linzer tart with Lilstein, and the war fades into the background. In the Élysée, your President is inclined to negotiate with the Russians, everyone knows that, you only have to read the newspapers, but the day he learns that the invasion really will happen he’ll be forced to tell the Americans and he’ll stand shoulder to shoulder with them and NATO will force the Russians to back off.

  ‘The best thing,’ Lilstein tells you, ‘would no doubt be to call a halt now, that way they’d stop hunting for a mole, we’ll have had a pretty good run, a Great Adventure, and you can stop worrying. Let’s leave them to their war, after all, why shouldn’t the Russians be entitled to a little colonial war, like everybody else? I’m not even sure many people will try to stop them.’

  *

  Everyone filed in and out of Berthier’s cubby-hole except Madame Cramilly, who went and complained to de Vèze, and de Vèze sent her packing, and Madame Cramilly told him that she had seen Berthier coming out of his – the Ambassador’s – office one day when he was out of town.

  ‘That’s his job,’ said de Vèze.

  He scribbled a telegram for Paris: ‘It’s him or me.’

  Chapter 6

  1978

  Four or Five Lilsteins

  In which de Veze takes a ride on a merry-go-round near the Palais de Chaillot.

  In which, despite your age, Lilstein continues to address you as 'young gentleman of France’.

  Ln which we are present at the very first meeting of de Veze and the niece of a Soviet marshal.

  In which, in the presence of a lady, you have a reaction which might well compromise your activities as a mole.

  Moscow, June 1978

  … human beings who as they stood before me have imperceptibly divested themselves of their first and often their second and third simulated selves…

  Marcel Proust, Time Regained

  Berthier burst into de Vèze’s office:

  ‘You’ve got to hand it to them…’

  He’d come straight from the telex room, a sleepless night, at last he’d found a number of bugs, not in the furniture, not in the walls, but inside certain machines, some of them dead simple, wires connected to a condenser with a shunt resistance, it modulates a high-frequency wave which can be tuned into remotely, better than tape-recorders any day said Berthier, he’d found his sharp tongue again, he gave orders:

  ‘No one comes in, no one goes out until I’ve finished here.’

  He asked Paris for reinforcements, they arrived within twenty-four hours.

  ‘Why “Lofty”?’ one of the new arrivals asked a secretary.

  ‘Because he’s so close to the ground.’

  Virtual house arrest for all personnel, and a pretty good haul, electronic receivers in the telexes and especially the coding machines, high-quality work, built into the circuits, parts disguised as transistors and condensers, the equipment was pretty old, according to the technicians the appliances dated from the early sixties, and the instruments ditto.

  Stout machines, sturdy, in the French mould, with a cast-iron base, the kind that don’t often need replacing, riddled to the core with bugs by the craftsmen of the KGB, doubtless when they were being brought from Paris to Moscow, would you believe, by rail in sealed trucks, and they’d been checked on arrival, that’s right, by unskilled workmen, early sixties, that meant the bugs had been installed in de Gaulle’s time, that’s almost fifteen years ago.

  People in the Embassy breathed again, no one had seriously believed there was a mole, and when Berthier left everyone congratulated him on doing a good job, before the month was up, Madame Cramilly gave him a small papyrus in a pot as a present, he said very nice things about her, he told her that she reminded him of Celeste, the old lady in Babar, a lot of playful confidences were exchanged but no one told Berthier what they called him behind his back.

  The naval attaché returned, this was Moscow, life there was not always easy, but the Embassy recovered and again became an efficient and happy community, with its dachshund, its papyrus, its military attachés, its four-colour ball-point pens and its old lady, a kind of scaled-down Célesteville, from which anger, discouragement, slackness, stupidity, fear, laziness and ignorance eventually faded under the benign influence of patience, knowledge, intelligence and hard work.

  All minds now were focused on getting ready for the barbecue to be held in the Embassy gardens, the next big occasion.

  In Paris, the President was not the least put out by this discovery, everyone calmed down, the aged Moscow equipment was repatriated and replaced by new machines which had the blessing of the Americans, who had even been allowed to give them a health check. Just in case, a team was set up to check out the staff who’d been involved with messages and codes during this whole period, some had retired and were living in the country, that too caused some problems for individuals without producing any positive results, there was an excellent report which summed up the affair, the point being to stop a few people sleeping easy in their beds.

  According to this report, a great deal of information had been leaked via the interceptors, not things which were very secret in themselves: for the sensitive stuff the old tried-and-tested precautions were observed, no names, no plans, but a sharp eavesdropper could get a very clear idea of Western policy by putting together a few general principles contained in messages exchanged between the Embassy and Paris.

  And that’s how the Russians must have found what was more or less a green light for their invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, when a French ambassador asked to know what he should say to the Kremlin by way of caveats and was told he should say ‘that it has been agreed with Washington, London and Bonn that we shall remain, within limits, flexible’.

  Perhaps the investigators made too much of this in order to make their discovery sound important.

  So the Minister had been right to send in Berthier, he summoned de Vèze to Paris, this time it is not known if de Vèze knocked before entering, what we do know is that the Minister allowed himself the luxury of apologising to de Vèze for Berthier’s mission, it hadn’t been easy, but it had been worth all the trouble.

  ‘That’s why, Ambassador, I assumed full responsibility myself, from the outset.’

  Now if de Vèze were to feel like taking a spot of leave, it would be a way of demonstrating French disapproval to the Russians without going too far, yes, de Vèze could even go away somewhere, not for long, but he could breathe more easily again, the Minister could do no such thing, de Vèze was a lucky man.

  On leaving the Minister’s office, de Vèze ran into some very old friends, the corridors were buzzing again, his companions from the old days smiled, hands were firmly shaken, hands that had lobbed grenades at panzers and now suddenly rediscovered their warmth and vigour, de Vèze loitered, filled up on sympathy, and while he stood there, in the corridor, a lot of people seemed to walk past as if by chance, it went on a fair time. He even tried to cross Poirgade’s path, did it casually, but he was told that he was away:

  ‘He came up trumps, you know, always spoke up in your defence.’

  In the late afternoon, de Vèze left the Quai d’Orsay, wanted a breath of air, felt like going at his own speed, he went
out by the side door, thought he’d make a brief pilgrimage, walked by the plaque put up to the memory of the crew of the Quimper, a tank belonging to the 2nd Armoured Division, which the Germans had shot up on this spot during the Liberation, de Vèze had known the crew.

  On the wall of the Ministry, old bullet holes had been left deliberately.

  De Vèze walked on, turning right on to the left bank, along the tall iron railings of the Palace, the monument to Aristide Briand, very kitsch, the bronze bas-relief, Briand receives a procession of grateful women, the women vertical, very straight dresses, hair gathered into plaits and the plaits pinned up like crowns on the top of their heads, one frieze dominates the rest: a ploughman, a shepherd, cattle, ears of corn, the France of 1932, a blacksmith is included though, but tucked away in a corner, the age when Poincaré expressed satisfaction that France had achieved a balance, with half her people in towns, an ideal to be perpetuated, unlike the Americans who were descending into decadence and industrial chaos, well spotted, 1932, a France already behind the times by thirty years and happy to be so.

  On the sides of the bas-relief, in columns, a hotchpotch of contradictory quotations about peace and country, disarmament and defending the nation, all jumbled up, but absent are Briand’s most famous words, ‘Away with the cannon, away with the machine guns’, from his great speech in the League of Nations, it was the one their teacher had given them as a dictation, at Cluses, the great dream, and they’d had to learn the dream by heart. Didn’t quite square with the plaque, thinks de Vèze with a smile, but at least it’s got a certain something. He’d liked his teacher very much even if he’d only realised it much later. A fairly young man, a pacifist, who put on shorts to take them to the sports field, he taught them to walk in step in the street, football under one arm, because in the long run, it’s discipline, it’s team spirit!