Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  ‘In Paris, people in counter-espionage will have their suspicions,’ Lilstein tells you, ‘the same way you have doubts. They have to have suspicions, I mean to say we’re in a risky business which operates on constructive fear and the charm of those frantic crises, no purpose is served by making yourself unsuspectable, one day someone will ask why you are so unsuspectable, so you’re wasting your time staying whiter than white, because in the end somebody will say: “the man’s too clean, if he isn’t a Soviet agent he’s burying his talents.”

  ‘There have to be blots on everybody’s record, otherwise it’s too good to be true, all the people I’ve ever known who were above suspicion came a cropper in the end, whereas everybody bears the mark of sin, they have to suspect people in sensitive jobs where suspicion is more dangerous than actual leaks, so they relax the pressure, they say that the cost-benefit ratio of hunting moles is too high.

  ‘That’s what the English thought, all those moles, even had a mole as head of their own espionage service, of course they suspected something, they spent years trying to nab them, not to protect old Cambridge chums or their little playmates in queerdom, there’s real pleasure to be had in eliminating old friends, no, if the English hesitated for so long it was because the whole thing was so gross that it looked like a trap.

  ‘The English have a memory for the wholesale traps, it all looked too much like the Tukhachevsky business, you’ll never understand why moles operating in England were so successful if you forget Tukhachevsky. ’

  *

  In front of everyone sitting round the table in the Consulate, out of the blue, Malraux suddenly asks de Vèze:

  ‘Bir Hakeim, how did you manage to walk out of there in the middle of the night?’

  ‘Our navigation point was five stars in the constellation Corbus.’

  Malraux:

  ‘What did you all reckon at the time?’

  De Vèze:

  ‘We reckoned it was perhaps a bit risky.’

  Max:

  ‘Is it true that at the time Berlin and Vichy both wanted you court-martialled and shot? you and your ragbag gang of French whites and blacks and the Judaeo-Bolsheviks of the Legion?’

  ‘True,’ said de Vèze, ‘de Gaulle went on radio quick as a flash with his answer: he’d treat German prisoners the same way, and Radio-Berlin back-pedalled, they’d treat us as soldiers, but that didn’t make us any more enthusiastic about the idea of being taken prisoner.’

  ‘Were you really in jeeps?’

  ‘No, there have been stories about jeeps but we didn’t have any, I was on one of those vehicles with tracks called “Bren-gun carriers”, one metre fifty high, you could get five men in it, didn’t offer much protection but it would go anywhere.’

  Three times de Vèze drove over the mines of Bir Hakeim, a way through had to be opened up, de Vèze, take one of the Brens and go for it, and when you’d gone for it and were still alive to tell the tale, you came back, got into another Bren and went for it again until there was a way through.

  De Vèze has never talked about it in detail, not through modesty, but because he didn’t like the Brens, what he would have liked was a plane and to be anywhere but Bir Hakeim, he’d have liked to start earlier in the war, whiff of knights of old, a fighter pilot over London, a Spitfire, like Mouchotte, when a few hundred men aged between eighteen and twenty succeeded in stopping Hitler, Battle of Britain, a dream, or with the Americans, the Naval Air Service, Battle of Midway, at the same time as Bir Hakeim, about ten in the morning, in just a few moments several dozen pilots sank the Japs’ aircraft carriers and it was all over, Japan had lost, and he knew now that it was just a question of time. Each time, just a handful of men with everything depending on them.

  In Africa it was different, a very small cog in an army of two hundred thousand men, it could be heroic, but not decisive, still Bir Hakeim wasn’t a bad show even if it was a retreat, it was also an Adventure, it paved the way for El-Alamein, the real turning point, a lot of rocks, two armies.

  ‘War in its purest form,’ says Max, ‘sand and gravel, soldiers, no civilians, a story that can be told, with radar, more and more radar.’

  Without really wanting to, de Vèze stares at Max’s ears. And Max smiles at de Vèze. He quite likes de Vèze, thinks he has a few too many illusions, heroism, an illness, not real war, we’re having dinner, not the moment for Max to bring out his tales of racking coughs, purulent gobbets of tracheal mucous membrane expelled at a rate of knots by the coughing, large lumps nestling in armpits and groins which peel raw after two days, not to mention internal swellings, ars abu lhawa, the jackal and his wedding, didn’t know how right they were, crafty Abd el-Krim, he succeed in re-grouping them, in a land where quarrels are so vicious that men are forbidden to go to the souk, only women, children and a few old men are allowed there.

  Valleys of archaic violence, eye for an eye, where there could be a hundred dead in vendettas every year, a man has insulted my honour, I kill him at some family gathering, his brothers come looking for me, the old men discuss, they weigh the arguments, I pay the tribe a fine, nothing will happen to me, and the host of the party where the man was killed also receives compensation, the relatives of the murderer lay down their rifles in full sight of the tribal council, a value is put on them, the relatives of the dead man say ‘more!’

  The murderer’s relatives add two or three rifles, then the elders cry ‘enough, let us recite the fatiha over them’, those who surrendered their guns may now buy them back, the remaining guns are auctioned off, when the sale is finished a deduction is made for the cost of the ox which was sacrificed for the meeting of the assembly, the cost of the oil for cooking it, the balance is shared out between each clan, and the assembly breaks up while the crier proclaims ‘there is no God but God, we are all brothers, we hate no one except the Spaniard!’

  Sometimes the relatives of the victim may continue to take their revenge on the relatives of the murderer, the dead man’s brother has the right to kill my brother, and if the victims are women or children the blood debt cannot be redeemed, if the murderers have run away the injured party waits until their children are old enough to carry weapons and then kills them, cursèd be the nation in which each man behaves like a nation!

  Actually Monsieur Goffard, it’s even more complicated than that, the agent for Native Affairs told him, archaic violence, it’s easy to say, but it’s primarily about honour, it has to be defended when insulted, but the man who offends another man’s honour is not only a delinquent, it’s something he must do, he has to issue his challenge, if these people are archaic it is because they’re forever challenging and defending, Abd el-Krim tried to turn all that into a republic, with phones and machine guns and honour and press releases, forbidding them to wage vendettas, we should add a few love songs for our female readers, ‘O mother dear, it was written, for whom did I wash my dress? For a man with beautiful eyes, but he did not see me, tonight I’ll throw myself into the sea’s blue waves.’

  Max, opposite de Vèze, ears like cauliflowers, now pink with drink and conversation:

  ‘I’m very happy with my ears, a guarantee of a long life, like Picasso, he’s got big ears too, when he was painting Helena Rubenstein, he said: “Helena, you’ve got ears like an elephant, they’re as big as mine, how old are you?” and she said: “Pablo, you know very well I’m older than you,” and he said: “Helena, elephants live for ever and so will we,” and I’ll be like Picasso and Helena Rubenstein, the Venerable Company of Jug Ears, I shall live for a long time yet, even if the world is getting less and less entertaining.’

  Taking aim with his fork over his lobster mayonnaise, Max emits a laugh which he hopes sounds cavernous, as if it came from outside his body, from the very bowels of the earth, he looks straight at de Vèze and says:

  ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’

  A cavernous voice, like a lesson from a place of darkness, with the waggish glee of some comic valet in a farce who has sudd
enly popped up out of the shadows, shot up from a world that is so dense, so elemental that de Vèze cannot recognise any of the things he has always believed in, a pool of magma in which great bubbles rise and burst one after the other and all the bubbles are of equal size, discord and betrayal all the way to the grave, chivalrous Adventure, Adventure is dead and gone for ever, the artful place their trust in the stars, Max punctuating his assertions with the rumblings of his stomach, oooh! aargh! groan, growl.

  The sounds didn’t come from the back of his throat or his nose, it was more a spasm of the abdomen, the muscles of the abdomen, but not a command transmitted to the muscles of the abdomen, muscles which instinctually respond to something which comes from the entrails, a place where time does not exist, snatches of an ancient voice in the depth of me, it’s not my voice, I’ll tell you everything, the truth is a bitch, a voice from before my time, a voice trying to get out, Max is not listening now, he is no longer looking, he is absorbed into the voice, that voice from before, and the dead people in my life, mud in mouths, the man is talking to you and next moment you’re stuffing his right leg into a bag, a pal hands you something small, muddy, hairy, his moustache, stuck to what’s left of a rifle butt.

  He had no right to go away like that, taking with him whole chunks of what you are, of what you had shown him, without him you’re nothing, what a mess, the kids, when they opened the doors of the cattle-trucks at Novosibirsk, gulag kids, rigor mortis well set in, you don’t take notes because you know you have to make them forget you’re a journalist, you say to the Red Army officer: war never kharacho, a show of fatalism you put on for him, actually you think it’s as normal as he does, though maybe he doesn’t find it at all normal but he hides it too, a fatalist, roll on peace, comrade journalist, we must be steel so that the bread of the future may finally be baked.

  Mustn’t tell him what you think of his half-baked metaphors, all your humanity has shrunk to an urge to puke and you hate yourself for not being able to puke, be steel, comrade dickhead, stay silent, the voices of silence, these are the real voices of silence, I have peeled my mind like an orange, both halves, and I’ve left nothing in the middle, that’s what the Adventure is.

  ‘They made out I was just a joker,’ says Max, ‘a silly, clowning Clappique, whereas my real name is Carnival, all the more reason for turning me into a jester.’

  Indicating Max, de Vèze says to Malraux:

  ‘He hasn’t changed one bit, so why is he the only one you’ve allowed to come back?’

  ‘Because he never asked me for anything,’ replies Malraux.

  De Vèze regrets having asked the question.

  Max has heard and laughs:

  ‘It was because our Great Author here wants to write Twenty Years After, or even thirty, and also because I’m the most important character in The Human Condition, my friend.’

  He counts off his fingers:

  ‘Kyo, Katow, Tchen, and I’m d’Artagnan!’

  And the young woman, to Malraux:

  ‘He’s not wrong, he’s just as important as the others.’

  ‘Ah, so you noticed,’ said Malraux in a gentler voice.

  ‘He’s your anti-hero,’ the young woman said to Malraux who is looking at her intensely.

  Forgetting de Vèze, she goes on:

  ‘It’s Clappique who gives the story its true dimension, its reverse image.’

  Malraux smiles at the young woman and de Vèze tries not to let his mouth hang open, many years ago someone told him it makes you look stupid, but if he clamps his jaws together he ends up looking like a martinet, just close your mouth without clenching your teeth, but he knows his face is on the full side, he stops thinking about the way the yellow material swoops down, what gives her the right to barge into the conversation like this? What gives her the right to get noticed by Malraux? This is de Vèze’s moment, it doesn’t belong to the wife of a historian, a blue-stocking, anti-hero my foot, do you know what you’re talking about? When de Vèze and his friends took Amilakhvari back, no one felt like playing at being anti-heroes nor at being Clappique either, history and its obverse, give me a break, not with a cheeky comic valet like Jug Ears around.

  To short-circuit the proceedings de Vèze murmurs under his breath to Malraux:

  ‘I belong to the generation that learned Kyo’s funeral oration by heart, I took orders from Amilak.’

  Max has heard, he mimics Malraux’s voice, his intonation descends from higher up in the pharynx, it is a voice that hangs an exclamation mark over the end of every statement, as if it was constantly at the pitch of Don Diègue’s words ‘that he should die!’ Max exaggerating every characteristic, rubato, glissando, he recites the death of Kyo, as if it were pastiche, he almost bleats: ‘“He fought for what in his day would have carried the deepest of meanings and the greatest of hopes.” Shush! don’t interrupt, that’s great prose, children!’

  Max laughs the way you cough, between the words, expelling great bursts of laughter from his lungs and his very bones, he shakes with laughter, testing the limits of sarcasm:

  ‘Chateaubriand, in that prison yard, in Shanghai!’

  The Consul looks anxiously at Malraux whose face has turned pale.

  The parody and the laughter have made de Vèze momentarily furious, he could kick Max, such a stupid thing to do, trying to pass himself off as Clappique, he could also have kicked the woman, he never imagined it would all turn out like this, this is his moment, de Vèze wanted to tell Malraux that he had recited the death of Kyo to himself at El-Alamein, after Bir Hakeim, a tricky business, there’s a rocky outcrop bottling up the battlefield at El-Alamein, the Free French are sent in, Amilak, you’ve got two hours to take the position, go along the thalweg.

  And Dimitri Zedguinidze, alias Amilakhvari, a Georgian prince forced to flee in 1917 by the revolutionaries, a lieutenant-colonel in the Foreign Legion, moves off to attack for France and for Montgomery, with a batch of French twenty-year-olds, Spanish anarchists and German Marxists, no artillery support, the attack fails, retreat.

  Amilak brings up the rear, in his kepi, he was made a Companion of the Liberation, killed by a piece of shrapnel in the head, de Vèze stood before Amilakhvari’s wooden cross and recited ‘the deepest of meanings and the greatest of hopes’ and the rest of it, he had to, ‘the deepest of meanings’, because the assault on the rocky outcrop was a shambles, a shambles that was followed three days later by victory, but a real shambles nonetheless and a hero who dies as the result of a cock-up needs ‘the deepest of meanings’, and here is Max parodying the whole thing, playing the fool.

  Max is not looking at anyone now, he toys with his fork, for fifty years they’ve been saying I’m always clowning, last night I played poker again with two German officers, I first spotted them in 1914, they were running away just ahead of me, under shellfire, I mowed them down, two bullets in the back, range of two metres, 14 September, they didn’t see a thing, sometimes they come back at night, we play poker, I can’t make out their faces but I can see their cards, I let them win, I clown around, this man who was at Bir Hakeim has never managed to get away from it, he’s a clown in his own way, the face he made when I said ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’, you want wars fought by parfit knights, just like that agent for Native Affairs, a war of chivalrous warriors, like the first war with its photo-opportunity cavalry charges, there we were, facing courageous Arabo-Berber enemies, on the knoll, Colonel Corap, an old student of Pétain, five journalists around the Colonel who shouts: ‘Bournazel, you may attack’, he didn’t actually say ‘attack!’ he didn’t issue an order, he gave prancing heroes their heads, heroism doesn’t stand around waiting, we all took it down in shorthand.

  The Colonel’s swagger stick points to the hill opposite, and Bournazel leads the charge with his three lieutenants and his seventy native mounted troops, pose for the photo; he’s wearing a red cloak and a blue kepi, as Corap tells it, the insurgents believe that the bullets fired at the red coat bounce back and k
ill the man who fired them, got to show these types from Paris what we do in Morocco, here ‘under a blazing sky, in this burning, pulsating wilderness of rock and scree’, a war fought by noble lords against fierce warriors, courageous to the point of foolhardiness, one of Max’s colleagues will write about ‘what our officers are capable of: standing in their stirrups as they charge, red burnoose streaming on the wind, devil’s gallop, heady excitement, hill captured, Bournazel lights a cigarette, trots back nonchalantly to his commanding officer, elegant figure carelessly wrapped in his cloak’, the insurgents are beaten, one of them was found hiding in a cave, both thighs broken, his comrades hadn’t been able to take him with them, or maybe he’d refused to go, he sat with his back to the rock wall, protected to the eyeballs by a low dry-stone wall, three rifles, water, olives, they didn’t know he was alone, he delayed us for two days.

  When they got to him he was dead, face serene, very dignified, maybe fifty years old, the agent for Native Affairs added: ‘we’ve got two types of enemy, Monsieur Goffard, the savage who slits the throats of our wounded men, and the thoroughbred warrior who respects us as we respect him, we have both sorts, the problem is that they’re often the same man.’