Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  ‘I act canny, he makes me run away, down corridors I go, trousers flapping, I would have none of it, I’m not sure if the incident of the voyeurs was something that happened to him, in the end he cut it, and the attack on the police station in the novel, a bravura passage, a triumph, it was actually I who first reported it in Le Soir, I was there with a colleague, Andrée Viollis, and Albert Londres, which, Monsieur Poirgade, explains my “Good God!” even though it pains you, I’ll say it whenever I want, and especially when I feel low because my author made me a Pied Nickelé, not a fool like Lear’s, not even permitted to read the future though I was born to be a prophet, oh I know, nowadays I’d be allowed to say whatever I like, but there’s nothing left to say.’

  Suddenly Max has the feeling that no one round the table is listening to him, or that they are pretending to listen because no one wants to be rude and interrupt, they’re just waiting for him to stop, he could say absolutely anything, don’t tell the story of the canticle, he could be somewhere else, leave Singapore, don’t go to Vietnam, still saying the same thing, I’ll end up begging in the street, I should have been a beggar from the start, Max-the-beggar, beggar and madman, later the Japanese sacked Shanghai, rats in gutters don’t distinguish between a baby and a dog, the baby doesn’t move as much, the magnificent Samurai have stopped laughing, and these people sitting here smiling around the table while the moon comes up over the garden all take me for a beggar, the kids with their rain maidens, no more kids, all they’d found were Riffian dolls on dung-heaps, the little piles of pebbles, the rain maidens, the Riff and its tales of jackals, the songs sung by the harvesters in the fields, songs that promised ‘for you I will screen the grain, I will riddle the grain, I will fetch wood, I will paint your cheeks, fold me in your arms, give me drink that the wicked may gnash their teeth’, report submitted by Armengaud, chief of French airborne forces in Morocco, I have the honour to respectfully draw to your attention the results obtained by the systematic, intensive bombing of the souks, over a period of a few days five bombing raids left a minimum of five hundred victims, I have given instructions for the tallies to give only the number of victims, without specifying age or sex, the impression produced has been very great.

  Terror reigns among the natives who actually have a tendency to exaggerate their losses, on 15 September 1925, several squadrons, one hundred and sixty-nine single-engine planes in the skies over the small settlement of Beni Zeroual, the heavy bombers, the Breguets and Farman Goliaths, have been reserved for Chefchaouen, an undefended town, they carry as markings the Shereef’s star with a hand of fatma at its centre, the planes of the 1st Squadron had a swastika instead of the hand of fatma, the state to which the town was reduced by the bombing even impressed the Spaniards.

  Bombing in waves over the town, it lasts three days, no fire returned, the warriors are about a hundred kilometres away, strafing of anything that moves in the streets, by lighter aircraft, on the left at the entrance to the town half a dead bull in the middle of the road, the gunners also used donkeys as targets to see them jerk their heads back like mad things when they were hit.

  Fierce conflagrations, one woman finds herself with a breast full in the face, half a child between her feet, birds from hell, children and women throw stones at the Breguets, three days of bombing, the real number of civilian casualties at Chefchaouen is difficult to assess because the French pilots are reluctant to give exact estimates of the losses inflicted, Max and the agent for Native Affairs traversing what was once a small village, ochre dust, leaden sky, very grey, the greyness is everywhere.

  Max saying you were telling me the other day about an enemy with two faces, one fierce one noble, very well, but how many faces do we have? Max putting the question a different way, your paladin upright in the stirrups, blue kepi, red cloak, how does he manage to defend widows and orphans if the widow and the orphan also start to disappear? When I say disappear it’s because I don’t want to talk about guts, stuffing your guts back inside you with your hands, smashed abdomens, skulls with strange stuff oozing out from inside, mouths gasping for air, air that doesn’t come.

  A loud Bang! and a man is no more than the sum of his nerves, flayed raw, especially when his skin has disappeared, let’s be euphemistic and say disappeared, even if you still have in your nose a stench which only very slowly disappears from your surroundings, I experienced it at Douaumont, when you realise that an eye is only one organ among many, and the blast from a bomb can eviscerate a body in just one second, we used to say it was all about defending women and children back home, but here the only thing left untouched by some miracle is a dungheap, with one of those doll things sticking out of the top, among the smells of dung, dust, rotting flesh, cordite, it’s all that’s left, a doll and the smells that hang on the air which grows hotter, more oppressive, not a breath of air, smells layered in the air.

  Dung and carrion give up the last of their moisture under the ochre sun, the people have been buried, there are now only parts of walls and the decomposing bodies of animals to testify to what has happened, in your statistics you count people on one side, livestock on the other, there must be some connection, a correlation, so many human corpses equals so many animal carcasses, I say this because by counting all the rotting carcasses here, and there really are a great many, it should be possible to infer a figure for people, just by counting the carcasses, the stench layered in the grey air, moisture which shivers in the heat, the stench shimmers suspended in the oppressive air, how does the paladin manage when there is no rain maiden to defend? Ask Pétain, Max, but pack your bags first, don’t forget, we’re here to put an end to the violence.

  The agent told him about the four years he spent teaching in a boys’ school, in the Middle Atlas, you know it can get pretty nippy up there between November and March, but each boy brought his own wood to burn, you should have seen how fast they learn French, and the black-winged storks on the roofs of the first purpose-built schools, you made the most of the opportunity to give them nature lessons, the preparations for their long journey, what do storks do in May? A boy puts up his hand, he has it off, sir, Max saying the natives have killed eight Frenchmen in Casablanca, we bombed the whole of the native quarter, we occupied Casablanca, they killed Doctor Mauchamp in Marrakech and we occupied Oujda, it’s practically eight hundred kilometres from Oujda to Marrakech, but Oujda is a very attractive town, so we land there, they always manage to kill one of ours, result: planes, cannon, reprisals, occupation, the whole country, to civilise it of course, and teach it about storks and the present indicative.

  In the Riff, the agent for Native Affairs had held his own against Max for as long as there was light to see by, but after dark around the fire he said I don’t like all this, I’m in favour of a fruitful war, inevitable but fruitful, History advances because of the bad things History does, but I don’t like it, and it’s worse in the Spanish zone, I put Pétain in touch with Franco a couple of months back, it was unspeakable.

  Max changes tone, turns to the wife of the Consul, just because the Master here turned me into a Pied Nickelé doesn’t mean I shouldn’t express the gratitude felt by my stomach:

  ‘Madame, this lamb is remarkable.’

  The pink diplomat has his nose in his wineglass. The mutton is hard and very rare, very rare and hard at the same time, how do they do it, yon bogus Clappique obviously knows, ‘remarkable’, the old hypocrite, an oikish compliment for uncooked sheepmeat that still reeks of farmyard, and Xavier has asked for more! He likes that sort of thing, all those uncivilised smells, should have seen him just now in the garden, standing in front of the mangrove, absolutely loves it, as soon as there are larvae, blobs that look like snot, embryonic life without arms or legs or eyes, jellyfish membrane, mudflat smells that catch you in the throat, all gurgles and effervescence, like the earth sucking itself off, all those bubbles and craters and spurting green sap, he’d like to splash about in it, and he claims he likes opera better than I do, that he’d comb Euro
pe to get his hands on some recording by Tadeo, what he really likes is when things squirm, anything you get in places where things squirm.

  Monsieur Xavier Poirgade likes crabs, he’s come up with a crab to look out for, a horrible creature, first time he told me the name I laughed out loud, one claw is huge, the other one’s normal, but the large one is as big as its whole body, they’re called fiddler crabs, it starts at puberty, Xavier can spend hours watching out for one of these crabs, he’s eating too fast, he’ll spend all night complaining, and this red wine, a Beaujolais which has not travelled well, fit only for a spinster, doesn’t even deserve to be pissed away, they’re all eating without paying any attention to what’s on their plates or in their glass, manners like savages.

  *

  ‘Yes, young gentleman of France,’ Lilstein says to you yet again in the Waldhaus, ‘in those days I really believed in the Tukhachevsky conspiracy, in ’37 I was part of what was left of the secret Party apparatus in Berlin, Hitler was everywhere, and our first concern was to hunt down the Trotsko-Bukharinians, I do what everyone else is doing, I give names, I use Tukhachevsky to oil the wheels, a Bonapartist plot, they swallow it without any trouble, I am young, I am implacable, to say the least.

  ‘But very quickly I get the feeling that I myself am starting to slip, the fashion then was for meetings around a table where every member had to denounce his neighbour, it was risky attending meetings like that and the point was for each of us to take pot-shots at everybody else, like they did in Moscow, I didn’t care for that little game, it was crazy, you could come a cropper because you were right-wing, and if you steered clear of the right you got the chop for your left-wing tendencies, you kept a constant eye out for anyone with that bloodthirsty look about them and anybody who seemed in his right mind was your best friend, I once tried to get out of a fix by telling a story.

  ‘Found it in Gogol, it’s about the servant Pelagia who takes it into her head to show Tchichikov’s coachman the way, now because she can’t tell her right hand from her left she gets all mixed up, and Selifane the coachman bawls her out and yells “be off, you and your dirty feet, you can’t tell the difference between right and left”, we’re all like Pelagia, right? Oh it was a stupid thing to do, and I knew I’d have to pay for it at the next meeting, one of us had already remarked that the things I said were amazingly irresponsible, I was about to have my very own plot, I’d last six months, if that is in the meantime the Gestapo didn’t start poking its nose in.

  ‘Three months after my little performance at the meeting, Stalin gives his speech on the draft constitution of the USSR, German translation, circulated clandestinely, and at the next meeting all the comrades gave me very strange looks, my story, the one about Selifane the coachman and Pelagia of the dirty feet had also been told by Stalin in his speech, I’d anticipated him by several months, I became an untouchable, a pure coincidence, we lived at a time when Gogol was probably the most topical read there was, but with Stalin there was no such thing as coincidence, I had also learned by heart numerous Lenin quotes, I managed to slip one in about the flexibility which all organisations must have, the atmosphere around me relaxed, a short while later a rumour went round to the effect that I was about to be summoned to Moscow, it was lucky for me the Nazis picked me up before I left, though maybe in Moscow they wouldn’t have really had it in for me either, I’ve walked in a lot of rain without getting wet.

  ‘The moral of the story is, in a nutshell: if you want to travel fast read Gogol, expect the unexpected, apply no rule too strictly, let the keepers of the laws have the pleasure of reminding you of them, always pay crude compliments to the lady of the house, use your knife to cut lettuce, even if you know the old story about oxidation by heart, it will let the people you have to deal with occupy the high ground, they love that, they’ll want to teach you what they know, but you too will know interesting things, almost ten years ago you were one of the first to know that the alleged report attributed to comrade Khrushchev was genuine, soon the Americans will invade Vietnam, I will tip you many, many winks.

  ‘To start with, the figures for their real losses, undoctored, you’ll see, or rather it’s your friend the Minister who’ll see, so funny the expression on the face of an American Secretary of State when you toss the real figures at him, maybe he doesn’t have them, perhaps he needs people like you to get the figures which his boss has given orders to be withheld from him, but you’ll have them, it will be assumed that you’ve estimated them, I’ll tell you how, a great commentator on international affairs, they need only give you your head, you will become an acute political analyst, your friend the Minister is already extremely taken with you.

  ‘I want you to have the freedom to think,’ Lilstein had told you, ‘I want you to bring me contradiction, the freedom of a man who thinks differently, you’ll be free, and you will convince, your friend the Minister will shine in Cabinet meetings in front of de Gaulle, and you will help me to be convincing in my meetings, I’m also on the side of the hawks, but I’m not shrill, I’m no warmonger, and the information I give is the kind that makes a majority of the Central Committee think that the enemy isn’t as strong as all that, so that we don’t need to tighten the screws too much.’

  *

  ‘You still haven’t told us what a Pied-Nickelés-type canticle is, Monsieur Goffard,’ the young woman said.

  ‘The discordant canticle,’ replies Max, ‘it occurs just before the death of Kyo, “he would have fought”, but I don’t fight, to get out of Shanghai I sling a matelot’s broom over my shoulder, I stow away on board a fine ship, O memory! and my favourite author makes me tell a canticle story to a passenger who happens to be lurking nearby, it’s set in South America, about how the bishop’s flock learns a canticle of praise in readiness for his visit, six months of rehearsals in the open air, and the great day arrives, my flock line up in front of the mission, under the lofty trees, it’s just like here, only less planned, not an English garden-style jungle planted with lots of different species, “one, two three” says the missionary who is leading the choir, and the flock are so tense, so nervous that no sound issues from their mouths, not a peep, but notwithstanding the hymn of praise still soars miraculously, old man, a miracle!’

  And Malraux, imitating the voice of Clappique, something between Mr Punch and Scapin:

  ‘A miracle!’

  Malraux with a Clappique-like gesture, hands extended to the young woman, palms out, fingers spread very wide:

  ‘A miracle!’

  It suddenly dawns on de Vèze that Max’s outrageous behaviour is a caricature of Malraux’s, it always was, so much so that Clappique plays Malraux and Malraux plays a caricature of himself, as if he were a clown in a hilarious film where the images are even jerkier than the clown’s gags, Malraux roars with laughter:

  ‘A miracle! and all because over those six months the parrots in the trees had plenty of time to learn the words!’

  ‘You’re spoiling it for him,’ the young woman said with a nod in de Vèze’s direction.

  She thinks him rather handsome, he was a hero once, he is very careful about what he eats, says no to bread though he helps himself to more mayonnaise, but eventually stretches out one hand for a crust, without looking at his hand, he’s probably a bit fat in the wrong places and doesn’t like being looked at when he’s undressing; he’d be a good man to have in a tight corner, what would he do in the grass, in the clearing, when the gamekeeper turns up and tells us to hop it? And me, lying face down on a towel and I can’t get up because I’ve taken my bra off to sunbathe, and the gamekeeper refuses to go away until we’re both on our feet, this happens on the banks of the Rhine, it’s warm and humid, the sap drips from the leaves.

  De Veze’s mind is elsewhere, he watches the young woman, thinks about the way she recites, steady voice, precise, as the dusk settles, when the colours fade from things, removes their mask. He turns to Malraux:

  ‘I really liked the death of Kyo, but now the
canticle turns out to be a psittacism.’

  ‘If you want drama, you still have the gift of the cyanide and the death of Katow,’ the young woman said to de Vèze.

  De Vèze does not answer, the young woman’s backside, he is sorry now that he hadn’t tried to get a good look at it before sitting down to dinner, he’d seen her legs, and all this time he’s forgotten all about her backside, you’re getting old, not legs from some hard-boiled crime novel, but neatly turned ankles, instep strongly arched, black shoes, heel just the right height, all that is now under the table, legs not too long but not coarse, given a little tenderness you could live with those legs. Immediately de Vèze regrets the turn of phrase, it undermines the kind of feelings he would like to have for her, rediscover the urge he’d had to kiss her breasts, your sex-drive does rather come and go, a woman had told him not so long ago, buttocks, they’d ideally be firm but yielding, he is surprised to hear himself say winsome.

  Max, raising his voice:

  ‘Cyanide, cyanide, there’s more to life than cyanide!’

  ‘But it’s the high point of the whole novel,’ says the grey diplomat, ‘Katow who decides not to take his cyanide and offers it to two young men, both condemned to death, who are afraid of being fed to the boiler.’

  The grey diplomat shuts up, swallows a mouthful of camembert, he is very fond of this scene where the young man who has been sentenced to death shakes Katow’s hand, young men, well-built, disoriented, take your hand in theirs, and at last a spark of humanity passes between men, it’s something very different from male squalidness, packs of males, and worst of all, those middle-class kids aping working-class violence, by the sea, when they’d hauled him out of the water, at Nice, after they’d pulled his swimming-trunks off, ‘let the air get to it’, with girls watching, one half of the boys chanted: ‘Xav-i-er, new-boy, poof!’ while the other half mimicked a choir of virgins, ‘he don’t use it, he can’t use it!’, they’d tied a little ribbon round it, and instead of handing out punishments the grown-ups in charge just laughed, and during his national service it was even worse, initiation rites, the only thing those swine deserved was a good thrashing, the grey diplomat adds: