Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  In the end, it was Corap who got his hands on Abd el-Krim, a full-scale raid, forced him to surrender, no fuss or bother, prisoner, parcelled up, packed off to La Reunion, Corap’s claim to fame, his last, the rest was less brilliant, he made general, in May 1940 he has an army, the 9th, facing the panzers, this is a touch trickier than with comic-opera peasants, Corap screws up, army in disarray, sacked, or rather retired from active service, the rout of 1940, ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’

  Preferable to behave like a buffoon, at least you weren’t taken by surprise in 1940, the rout was the answer to the question put to me in 1918: Max, how did you manage to keep going? you said it was for love of country, because you believed in it, patriotic consent, you came back from the war with a military cross, a medal and several citations, rank of reserve Captain, twenty years later you find yourself up against the Germans with your medals, and you realise that in 1914 there’d been no consent given, you hadn’t agreed to any such obscenity, you obeyed, it was obedience, if you went you died, if you didn’t you died, gendarmes to bully us out of our fear, ‘On your feet, you dead men!’ And in 1940 people remembered, no one waited, tell it how you like, the chiefs of staff screwed up, the holidays with pay which meant that aeroplanes weren’t built, the ministers ran away, all the reasons you like, the truth is that if men kept their heads down, it was because finally they did what they’d been too scared to do twenty years before, what their fathers had been too scared to do, they had no wish to be guts hanging from a tree or have their heads blown off, ‘so on your feet, you live men!’

  And this time the living were too numerous for the gendarmes to arrest them all or for the colonel to have them shot, the firing-squads and the gendarmes kept their heads down just like everyone else, before everyone else did, meaning and hope? no thanks, we gave already.

  De Vèze watches Max and the historian’s wife, a birdbrain and a buffoon, and she dares to talk about anti-heroes, the obverse of history, what does she know about it? That’s what you get when you let people speak who know nothing or laugh at everything, de Vèze feels like provoking an incident, another voice is heard, not Max’s, ‘he would die surrounded by men with whom he would have liked to live’, the continuation of the death of Kyo, no, not that!

  It’s the young woman who is continuing to recite the words, why is she interfering? They’re all the same, you look at them, they are aware of it, the hell with her, never touched a gun in her life and she talks about anti-heroes, she’s wrecking everything, blue-stocking, the others have gone quiet, go on, recite away, it’s tea-time at the Comédie Française, she goes on, ‘he would die as each of these men had died, because he had given a meaning to his life’, an odd look comes over the faces of the other guests as they listen.

  As if it was some miracle that I should know the passage by heart, that a woman should be interested in anything other than bindweed in a hedge or the penises of the men around the table, the Ambassador might well be intelligent but he feels obliged to preen himself because I’m wearing a thin dress and am married, ‘what value could be placed on a life for which he would not have been ready to die?’ and Philippe who had no idea I’d read this novel, he thinks it’s enough for him to love me, to marry me and now looks at me furiously because tonight I didn’t wear a slip, a modern husband, I’ve seen him from all points of view, ‘death surfeited with fraternal bleatings, a gathering of the vanquished where multitudes would recognise their martyrs’, Monsieur Goffard’s got a nerve, no respect for his author, he’s usurped his role, actually Malraux is much more attentive to people than I’d have thought, has style, no tics, he acts out a lot of what he says, uninhibited, ‘a bloody legend from which golden legends are made’.

  *

  ‘You probably know all about the Tukhachevsky affair? I won’t press it,’ Lilstein had said, ‘at least that’s one story I don’t need to tell you.

  ‘Anyway if any people in Paris ever pick up your scent, they have to be able to see a trail, don’t be a perfectionist, don’t cover all the tracks in your life, an adolescent’s dream, some harsh treatment which might have given you cause for resentment, and don’t behave as if you’d forgotten the story of your father’s life, everyone knows it, you must give the guard dogs something to think about, they’re only dogs, above all don’t break off any relationships which might be held against you, they’ll need to be able to hold things against you, lead whatever life you please, leave the same tracks as Mr Average, and everyone leaves the same tracks as you will, and your pursuers will go round and round in circles, they’ll start admitting the possibility that there is a fake traitor (does more damage than a real one), the idea is that those who are looking for you will conclude that the hunt is costing them more than the game is worth, that’s where the Russians showed real genius in running the Cambridge spies, the English only decided very late in the day to smoke out their moles because they’d been finding that trying to identify them was more costly than what the moles were costing them.

  ‘You have only one thing to fear, sometimes you are too brilliant, much better be diffident, gauche, the sort of man who wipes his feet on the doormat when he’s leaving your house, brilliant analyses, awkward gestures, you have to give people the feeling that they’ve got something to teach you, they like teaching people things, you’re on a bike with stabilisers on the back wheel, a long avenue of chestnuts, autumn, sun on dead leaves, you’re not sure of yourself, a great many people will want to teach you to ride your bike without those stabilisers, just for the pleasure of having shown young people how things are done.

  ‘They will help a young gentleman of France such as yourself, they will back you, push you and watch you speed along the avenue of life, on two wheels, their hearts will swell with pure didactic joy and you too will laugh aloud to show them how so very pleased you are, you know who set up the Tukhachevsky operation?

  ‘No, it wasn’t German counter-espionage, not Canaris, I was right in thinking there are gaps in your encyclopaedic knowledge, a tremendous coup, the entire high command of the Red Army and the top echelon of Soviet espionage wiped out from 1937 onwards, in just over a year, no, it wasn’t one of Stalin’s mad moments nor was it just political, the tyrant who gets rid of senior army officers who might make a bid for power, Stalin of course would have liked to, and certain generals might also have been tempted, but that in itself wouldn’t have been enough, it needed a small spark of genius, it was supplied by a piece of shit, which is why it’s hardly ever talked about, Heydrich, the Nazis’ top knife-man, the spark of genius did not come from a civilised German, a professional like Canaris or Gehlen, it came from a sadistic piece of shit, and the element of genius here was that it was not direct, the way Marshal Tukhachevsky made contact directly with the Nazi top brass was too obvious.

  ‘Heydrich did much better, he began with a copy of a directive from Hitler ordering the Gestapo to keep tabs on the general staff of the Reichswehr because it looked as if German generals were plotting something with Tukhachevsky and his little Moscow comrades, the Hitler directive was quite genuine, Heydrich had asked Hitler to draft it for the good of the cause, and then proceeded to fatten up the file bit by bit, a few forged letters from German generals with signatures copied from cheques, plus various documents signed Tukhachevsky forged by an expert, references to meetings which might have taken place when Tukhachevsky was on missions abroad, banter, bogus banter made to sound bogus, in one of the letters a German general talks of their shared passion for violins.

  ‘Yes, Tukhachevsky was the scion of an aristocratic family, studied music at the conservatoire, and he’d learned to make fiddles under Vitachek, the violins letter made Stalin absolutely furious, it was entirely about violins, reaction on the lines of ‘I don’t believe it, you couldn’t make it up’, vital not to pass him anything definite, leave him space to use his imagination, he is very good at imagining is comrade Iosif Vissarionovich, a terrible militaro-fascisto-trotsko-reactionary plot designed t
o help the Germans, Tukhachevsky is the link between Bukharin and Trotsky, he has met German generals in London where he also saw the son of Trotsky, Sedov, no, that’s not in the file manufactured by Heydrich, it would have been too obvious, Stalin himself said so, and better still Tukhachevsky admitted everything after one brief night in the Lubyanka.

  ‘He even admitted the link with the chiefs of the NKVD, what was the link? A woman! A German Mata Hari, a rival of Fraülein Doktor, a certain Josephine Guenzi, Stalin himself told the story, she enlisted these men “on the basis of a certain part of her feminine person”, a genuine piece of contemporary linguistic usage, and Stalin added something else in a very odd speech given before the military council of the Commissariat for Defence, June 1937.

  ‘He added, “she is beautiful, she responds to propositions from men and then she destroys them”, sounds like something out of the Old Testament, one day it will all come out, Josephine Guenzi doesn’t like soldiers, she doesn’t like Stalin, she doesn’t like Hitler, she doesn’t like men, she commutes between Moscow and Berlin, among Tukhachevsky’s papers they found an X-ray picture, an obscene image, profile of a woman’s face embracing a male member, no one knows what Josephine Guenzi is thinking, all you see is the outline of a female skull, and the man’s penis, a vanitas in the form of an X-ray, normally the penis does not show up, no bone, so some medical students’ prank, a montage, but the fake X-ray became one of the incriminating pieces of evidence, calling it into question would have been to call all the charges into question, and besides the erection was intended to make it absolutely obvious, things happened very quickly, no one dared say it was a physical impossibility, maybe Tukhachevsky kept the photo to have a laugh with his friends.

  ‘Or else it was one of Yezhov’s agents who put it among the general’s papers, the cops descended on Tukhachevsky, you’re for the drop soldier-boy, it seems they brought the Guenzi woman to see him, pleasing face, very sweet, like an Astrakhan doe, talk, we feel so very very sorry for you, the heart of a man is a box of secrets, we have all night to unlock that box, Guenzi was seen again at the time of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, such an innocent face, she disappeared somewhere into this immense world of ours, she knew a great many things, she knew how to hide the fact that she knew them, she was in love with everyone and everything, two or three of my colleagues ran into her before the war, she laughed like a child, all she thought of was loving and living, she must have watched Tukhachevsky die, you cannot share the death of another person, to relax she read romantic novelettes of an evening, the kind where the heroine gets into a hot bath to await the coming of her lover.

  ‘The whole business is hard to swallow, on the one hand a plot at the very top, and on the other a plot that doesn’t work and is uncovered before it’s got going properly, the explanation given by Stalin – and you don’t label yourself “a leading light of science” for nothing – was that the plot at the top could not have any roots at the bottom because “the USSR whose agriculture is now prospering is experiencing tremendous success on all fronts”, the whole of the Soviet general staff decimated.

  ‘No, decimated means that one in ten is eliminated, whereas then it was hardly one in ten who survived, and they weren’t just any old victims, but technicians, modernisers, experts with advanced knowledge of field warfare, armoured vehicles and rockets, people from research institutes, and specialists from Germany working with the NKVD, they all disappeared in 1937, it took just one night for Tukhachevsky to confess, and it had all begun with a fake plot dreamed up by Heydrich in which Stalin developed an absolutely unshakeable belief on account of the violins, because appearances belong to those who look at them, that’s what held the English back later, when they were told that parts of their espionage and counterespionage services were in the pay of Moscow, they thought they were being set up for a Tukhachevsky-style hoax.’

  Chapter 8

  1965

  The Locomotive and the Kangaroo

  In which it is noticeable to what extent the Riff war is an obsession for Max Goffard.

  In which Lilstein tells you the story of Selifane the coachman and asks you to continue thinking your own thoughts.

  In which we are introduced to cyanide and soft-centred chocolates.

  In which Lilstein attempts to translate for you what he understands by the word Menschheit.

  In which the conversation between Max Goffard and his author takes a disagreeable turn.

  In which de Vèze decides to play footsie under the table with the woman opposite him at the dinner table.

  Singapore, July 1965

  Novels are not serious; what is serious is mythomania.

  André Malraux, The Human Condition

  On the veranda the woman in the yellow dress has finished reciting, no one feels like talking, swallows swoop, sickles, down to grass-level, they shriek, wheel back up into the sky, waiters whisk away the empty plates, bring leg of mutton, flageolet beans, Beaujolais, the Consul indicates that the pink diplomat will taste the wine, he’s our expert gourmet, he’s very much in demand in the diplomatic colony, he even advises the Russians, it’s his area of excellence, along with opera, old recordings.

  The pink diplomat tastes the wine, reports to the Consul that his Beaujolais is excellent, he does not believe a word he says, a tightwad’s god-awful rotgut, just what’s needed to go with your leg of mutton, you pretentious careerist, these young Chinese waiters are rather alarming, any minute now one of them is going to drop food all over me, Xavier would blow his top, that said they seem nimble enough, how old do you suppose they are? Never seen them before, are they Consulate staff? Or were they brought in? Whom can I ask? That young woman is good value, just talks but she’s upstaging old Goffard and the hero of Bir Hakeim, and given half a chance Malraux would make a play for her, look at the expression on the face of the hero of Bir Hakeim.

  Before the War, de Vèze wouldn’t have cared at all for her way of reciting, too neutral, anyway the death of Kyo isn’t a number for women, but her voice is good, simple, she pronounces the syllables clearly, she looks quite attractive when she recites, no histrionics, she just speaks it, very simply, lips neither too big nor too small, everyone’s looking at her, even Malraux, she’s no flirt, but does she know what comes next? Goffard could continue where she leaves off, I’ve had enough, why didn’t they all shut up? The moment was mine, to think I came all the way from Rangoon for this!

  Malraux looks at the young woman, his look is an encouragement, elbows on the table, his hands clasped on a level with his nose, just the eyes can be seen, the puckering of the crow’s feet, silver cuff-links. The young woman resumes, voice very steady, ‘how, with the glance of death upon him, was it possible not to hear the murmur of human sacrifice…’ her husband looks surprised that she should know this by heart, ‘… which cried out to him that the virile heart of men…’ the hero of Bir Hakeim is just like the rest of them, he will like my voice, but it’s too late, ‘… is a resting place for the dead as worthy as the mind of man…’ that beauty spot on her breast looks like a chocolate chip, this time the young woman falls silent, a chocolate chip on lightly baked, warm brioche.

  The resting place for the dead ‘as worthy as the mind of man’, it sounds like a response to the Minister, says Morel, happy to have found this question to ask when his wife stopped talking, he is cross with himself for not knowing the work of Malraux as well as the rest of the company, but basically he doesn’t think much of The Human Condition, he’s a historian, he never got beyond what one of his teachers said of it, ‘Chinese news items stewed in adjectives’, exactly the kind of history that Morel loathes, fiction culled from newspapers, the instant seductive come-on, just like the Ambassador sitting opposite his wife, it’s as plain as a pikestaff that he wants to lose no time in seducing her with that big mouth of his.

  ‘That’s right,’ says Malraux, ‘it was a response to Benda, he’d accused intellectuals of betraying the mind by opposing fascism, he was wrong
, but anyway that passage is very oral, I wanted a voice to be heard, to release the novel from the silence of the page, I turned the thing almost into a canticle.’

  Max:

  ‘Good God! A song of praise, death of the knight, end of the hero, but in the novel I offered another canticle, struck a discordant note, the note that banjaxes emotion, canticles are complicated chaps, especially when they come with discordant notes!’

  ‘What other canticle?’ Morel asks Max.

  ‘The Pieds-Nickelés-type canticle, the one he makes me tell before the death of Kyo,’ says Max, ‘when I manage to get on the boat leaving Shanghai, absolutely, while the others are imitating roast meat in the boilers of railway engines, I shake the dust of Shanghai from my feet with a dexterity worthy of the Pieds Nickelés, you must watch out for those Pieds Nickelés, the Master stuck a patch over my eye, said it was like Filochard’s in the Pieds Nickelés, true, but not very nice, whereas I was hoping to be promoted to at least a Lear-type fool or maybe Scapin, a real out-and-out knave, but the Master has always been able to wind me round his little finger, he put one over on me first time we met in Indochina more than forty years ago, I helped to get him out of jail, and then he used my articles about Shanghai for his novel, and so that no one would notice he put me in it, he made me older, turned me into a dealer in antiquities and saddled me with the name Clappique, I had to kick up a stink to make him cut a scene he’d put me in, can you imagine it, a hotel, I’m in the dark, with a large naked woman, surrounded by men breathing heavily, a voyeurs’ orgy.