Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  She marched further into the room holding a file, she stopped when she got to you and snarled:

  ‘Why are you always so condescending when you talk to me?’

  Chin thrust forward, and Chagrin had a lot of chin to thrust, you could have said ‘Who, me?’ and protested your finest feelings, instead of which you did something much more incisive, you looked at her with a smile on your face, she assumed she was being offered the hand of friendship, and more than friendship, but you said something to her you would not have dreamed yourself capable of saying, even now you have no idea where it came from, as though there was another person who had always lived alongside you without ever saying a word and all of a sudden, with this increasingly powerful woman standing in front of you, came out with a sequence of unexpected, unforeseeable words which went straight to the heart of everything Chagrin held most dear and revealed to you a self you’d never suspected of containing such violence, you said to her:

  ‘Because you’re a spiteful slag.’

  It wasn’t too loud, nor said in anger, ‘slag’, but suddenly you remembered, that word had made life difficult for you once before, you’d forgotten, your wife had never forgiven you, she’d made you look a fool but you had made the biggest blunder by insulting her, your lawyer said that you’d spoken the word just once, your wife’s lawyer pointed out to the judge, who was a woman, that his client had obviously lived for years with a man who had turned the word ‘slag’ round and round in his mouth without daring to say it out loud.

  You’d so completely forgotten such violence that you’d stopped believing you could ever be capable of such a thing, it had cost you a divorce and now you’d flung the forbidden word in Chagrin’s face with sufficient force that the two duty security men jumped and suddenly became part of the scene, so that Chagrin was both disconcerted that there should have been witnesses and immediately struck by the thought that now she had you, because you had just committed an irredeemable act.

  You don’t tell Lilstein about this episode because you have the feeling that you’ve just screwed everything up completely, twenty years down the tubes, and all for just one word, just as it was with your wife, all you say to Lilstein is that you get on very badly with Chagrin, which is actually what he’d asked, Lilstein changes the subject, bemoans the demise of the Gemütlichkeit which used to characterise Waltenberg and speaks once more of the old man of Moscow who is such a worry to him. He says that these days even success has a bitter taste.

  ‘My greatest success was my greatest failure, it was the Haupt affair, everything the papers said was broadly speaking true, I’d succeeded in placing someone in the entourage of Chancellor Haupt, a direct line to the top, just like you, but even more focused, every confidential note passed through his hands, that’s right, it was his secretary, Eisler.

  ‘There was nothing for me to do, except see him when I needed to, or I would send someone instead of me, it was actually embarrassing to have so much reliable intelligence, we spent more time concealing what we knew than ferreting for things we would have needed to know if our man hadn’t been in position. I tried to protect him, but he laid golden eggs, they made me work him as hard as I could, that’s where it all went catastrophically wrong, Eisler was blown and when he went he also brought down Haupt who was the only German to have a clear vision of what Germany would turn into, we’d been protecting Haupt for a very long time, he was a genuine social democrat, an enemy, but of the highest calibre.

  ‘When he was almost unseated by the right in the Bundestag, I bought two Christian-Democrat MPs, closed ballot, Haupt was expecting to lose, he was so surprised that he remained in his seat while the Bundestag rose, well at least his friends did, to give him a standing ovation, he was out for the count. That time I saved his skin.

  ‘But only to bring him down later with a bump because we had a mole who was too good! That’s why I always went carefully with you, young gentleman of France, I’ve kept you all to myself, I don’t even tell the mirror in my bathroom about you, no other contact except me, and that only the strict minimum. From a technical point of view, the downfall of Willi Haupt didn’t make life at all difficult, we had other sources, but something had been lost, which included our appetite for what we were doing.’

  Haupt, Chagrin, the jokers, the feeling of disgust, it hardly made for the merriest evening you’ve spent with Lilstein. The next morning, he had disappeared.

  You stayed on for a few days at Waltenberg, an informal session of the Forum, barely thirty participants, on the question of interest rates in Europe, dry-as-dust. You are the only French person there. You followed the debate but did not speak.

  That evening, in the lounge, there was a freer and more political discussion, about rumours of the tramp of Soviet jackboots in the East, in Afghanistan, you thought about what you’d said to Lilstein, you weren’t taken in, you can see through his game, even his melancholy, he is never stronger than when his morale is low, he loves playing the part, he relaxes into it, he seems to be asking for help, but you know he could give an order and have you liquidated, no, you can’t convince yourself that the thing is possible, you run through your multiple Lilsteins, there’s the first, the one you’ve only just left, who eats his Linzer like a little boy, his spirits are low, he is against the warmongers, he agreed to go to bed with the butchers to change the world but the world hasn’t changed, so he does all he can to make it change, you are friends, and the world does change, only not the way he wanted, he decides to retire and drops everything, he shows you the trumps in his side’s hand to prevent the worst from happening, just like Cuba, because he hates the mangy dogs of war, as he calls them, he passes you everything so that the Americans will react swiftly, ruthlessly, and force the Soviets to back down, thus no invasion of Afghanistan.

  But you’re not entirely sure of this first Lilstein, there is undeniably a second, without scruples, we’re not going to allow the said Asian country to turn the clock back, revive the droit du seigneur and feudal dues, progress has been made and must be preserved, there are the frontiers of socialism to defend, an interventionist Lilstein who uses both his own doubts and you to persuade the West that there are very high-placed Soviets who are opposed to this intervention, intelligent men in other words, and the West must help these intelligent communists by being flexible, and making the most of this flexibility the Soviets, the warmongering crowd, will march into Afghanistan and present the West with a fait accompli, yet maybe Lilstein is genuinely opposed to this intervention, in which case he would use the flexibility of the West to tell Moscow that American flexibility is in all likelihood a trap set by the Americans.

  The Americans demonstrate by their flexibility that they would like the Soviets in turn to land themselves in a pit of shit in Afghanistan, so going into Afghanistan would mean walking into an imperialist trap, so they shouldn’t go in.

  But if Lilstein does favour intervening, he can also say that by making the Soviets believe that intervention is an imperialist trap, the Americans want the Soviets to back off the idea of intervening and thus demonstrate a weakness which would be prejudicial to the interest of socialism across the globe. That’s Lilstein number four. You tell yourself that there must be others.

  And then you’d got tired of pondering all this by yourself, you banished Lilstein from your thoughts that evening, in the lounge of the Waldhaus, so that you could address a few Forum colleagues and two or three good-looking women, and you gave your hypotheses another airing.

  You delivered under several headings, in a thorough-going Kriegspiel, a sheaf of hypotheses, like an exquisite papyrus flower, from one end of a sofa, to ten or so people, sometimes a brief pause to savour the smoke of your Monte-Cristo, and the non-smokers smile and are happy to breathe in what is rare and costly, you are elated, you have never spoken as freely, you don’t give a shit about Chagrin, Lilstein, his retirement, everything, you know that in Paris your slanging-match with Chagrin has thrown everything into the mixing-bo
wl, she will cut off your access to the President.

  And when you got back, reception party at Orly, three tight-lipped men, a Citroën, the SM which you don’t like, the suspension makes you feel car-sick, they drove you directly to the Élysée, taking you in through the garden.

  The chief’s floor, the chiefs antechamber, he doesn’t like being called ‘chief, everyone is tense, you feel you are no longer the man everyone likes because he puts the chief in a good mood, you can’t catch anybody’s eye, one of the men who is escorting you knocks on a door, stands back to let you in, closes it behind you and then the President comes on to you like a jealous lover:

  ‘My dear fellow, they tell me that at Waltenberg you gave a dazzling analysis of Soviet policy, you see I already know all about it, you mustn’t be so modest, it wasn’t you in journalistic mode, I was told that you made four points, the logic was incisive, but they weren’t able to give me details, but really, when you hand out the brilliant analyses you could at least let me be the first to hear them, just the two of us, instead of shooting your mouth off in the lounge of a Swiss hotel, I’m jealous, I said just us two, you must know I never repeat any of our conversations. Way back, during the Cuba crisis, you gave first-rate advice, but let’s not beat about the bush: if the Afghanistan situation were to develop, what would you advise?’

  You tell your jealous chief you have no idea, he insists, eventually you say that now is the time to display those qualities of diplomacy which have been the rule since Choiseul and Talleyrand: neither prudence nor impulsiveness, allow time to look before you leap. If the Russians invade Afghanistan and win, it would still be just a dump, full of peasants, and if they lose, it will be a terrific result for the West.

  ‘Couldn’t agree more,’ says the President, ‘words of wisdom. Over Cuba you took a harder line, that was more like you.’

  You get a smile from him, a smile of amused benevolence for your concern about the West as a whole and even the Atlantic Alliance, an acute analysis which in reality boils down to little more than a policy of ‘wait and see’.

  ‘But as head of state, I have to act, I have to think of the interests of France, not just of the Atlantic Alliance, this time the Russians must not be weakened too much, otherwise you can say goodbye to our national independence, there’ll have to be a painful face-to-face with the hot-dog eaters, the Russians must not be humiliated and made to withdraw, Cuba was lesson enough for them, and that god-forsaken Asian hole can remain within their traditional sphere.’

  You tell him maybe he’s right, that you don’t know, you imagined he would be a lot less like de Gaulle, he’s very fond of acting up like an Englishman or a New Englander, and here he is talking about national independence, in the election he stood against a Gaullist who nowadays is reduced to attending parties given by the Marshal’s widow, but once elected he pursued the very policies he had previously denounced and rejected, evidently with forked tongue, he runs a risk in doing so, he loves playing this role when you’re with him, he probably doesn’t do it often, but when you are his audience of one he doesn’t pass up the chance, journalists reckon that this concern with national independence is the product of certain French constants, your man is constrained by history, geography, economics, pommes-frites, but you know that if he’s acting this way now it’s basically because for some time he’s been increasingly drawn to doing things he doesn’t like doing, he feels easier when he’s doing them, it’s a rule of politics: if you choose to do what you don’t like doing it gives you better control, and you aren’t so disappointed.

  You reflect that there must be one last Lilstein, the one who anticipated that you would suspect him of having at least four faces, that you would build four hypotheses, and that those hypotheses would eventually lead you to the office of the President, who will eventually tell you that he has opted for a policy of flexible response to the Soviets, that the Germans will follow suit, and then even the Americans have just confirmed that they won’t push too hard on this one.

  And you know that you will pass on this intelligence to Lilstein.

  The President walks you to the door of his office, his tone is kindly:

  ‘There’s someone here who would benefit greatly from talking to you, it would do her good, broaden her ideas, she has a difficult, a very wearing job, her horizons are narrow, true she loathes you, I know you never called her Lady Piddle, but I’ve heard about one very coarse word; she deliberately provoked you but it surprised me coming from you, I never realised you had such a short fuse, and now she hates you.

  ‘She says terrible things about you, though she doesn’t really believe them, I’d like you to have a few sessions with her, I like the people around me to get on with each other, true you don’t come here often anyway, now you mustn’t start taking offence, you know how fond I am of you, I try to keep it simple, you’re the only one who refused to go with me to Africa, I know some who’d strangle their mother and father to go hunting with me, I’m not asking that, and I forbid you to tell Chagrin what you tell me, I want exclusive access to you, or don’t talk to her, that’s all right too, and when you’re next in Switzerland you could try to be a tiny bit less brilliant, is that so hard? Will you come to dinner on Saturday? I command you!’

  *

  On the quais de Vèze continues his walk, he starts laughing to himself, a memory of that evening in Singapore in 1965, he remembers a gag, a practical joke that was played on him during dinner, he never found out who was responsible, he suspected Jug Ears of setting him up.

  But he never succeeded in finding out who had played that damnable trick on him. It might even have been the man whom de Vèze admires, the guest of honour, no, it couldn’t have been. Besides, the man de Vèze admires told the story of that dinner party in 1965 in one of his books, de Vèze was rather put out not to have been mentioned, the book said most about Jug Ears, spoke of him with affection, whereas in fact he had behaved very ungraciously with the man de Vèze admires, at one point they’d been on the verge of having a rather serious incident.

  But basically, in the book, Jug Ears and the man de Vèze admires see more or less eye to eye, the man does not actually say ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’ but in his introduction he does observe that comedy is as important in history as tragedy, that the presence of comedy is everywhere irrefutable and as elusive as a cat, that the Great Adventure is now just an empty apartment, that thought can never cancel time’s lease, he is on the verge of pronouncing the end of History.

  As he turned the pages, de Vèze thought it was all beginning to sound rather grim but here and there he caught echoes of what he had felt that evening in Singapore in 1965, words spoken from sheer enjoyment which buzz like bees in a hedge seen against the sun.

  De Vèze continues walking along the quais of the Seine, he is beginning to feel tired, he remembers the Kessel book, just when everything seemed to have sorted itself out, try to find the bookseller again, buy Wagon-lit, he hadn’t been fair, ‘I felt the thrill of the fever’, you can’t get by without clichés and books of that kind have their uses, people say I could write as well as that, that helps, everyone knows what it is to have had the thrill of a fever.

  Now Lord Jim or Typhoon are a different kettle of fish, but you feel so slow-witted, that is the paradox of Conrad’s novels, when you’re into them you feel both happy and stupid, and to be happy you forget you’re stupid, it’s only if you, personally, want to write that it comes back and hits you. De Vèze has a great many books, almost as many in Moscow as in Paris, often he has two copies of a book, he’s always taking books to Moscow and when he feels like dipping into any of them in Paris he buys another copy.

  And every evening always the same problem, which book to read before he goes off to sleep? Thousands of books within easy reach and not one to suit his mood, to help him make his peace with his own breathing even if it’s only for a moment, something light to read before he drops off, every evening de Vèze runs his eye over the shelves o
f his library, a friend once told him if you’ve never bought a house in the country it’s because you’ve got one here, on your bookshelves.

  A partiality for fiction especially, these last few years, and all this so he can have something he can read or reread, he would hesitate, pick up a tome, read a page, put it back, hum-and-ha for maybe an hour while the moment for sleep passed, comes the evening and nothing takes his fancy, La Route des Flandres for instance, during the day he can get absorbed in it, saying he’s not to be disturbed, but in the evening, he can’t find a thing to read, to be fair he doesn’t know what he wants exactly, one day he made a particular effort with an assistant in a Latin Quarter bookshop who was pressing him.

  In the end he said I want a novel full of action with a happy ending, the young woman looked at him with a smile:

  ‘You want him to get married? Or earn a lot of money? Or both together?’

  She answered her own question:

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t have anything like that, or else if it’s a classic you want, how about War and Peace?’

  ‘Yes,’ said de Vèze, ‘that ends fairly happily, after twelve hundred pages the heroine has got fat, she has acquired homely tastes, takes up needlework and treats her hubby like her teddy bear, Natasha she’s called, puts on twenty kilos, but all women end up fat, you’re right, I’ll have a copy of War and Peace.’