Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  ‘That handshake is very fine.’

  Ah! He’s waking up! de Vèze doesn’t like friend Poirgade, charcoal grey, uses big words, podgy, weasel-faced, moustache and small beard fringing his mouth, like a monkey’s arse, inquisitive, a pillow-biter, expert in strategy or not, well-connected or not, he can’t stand him, a straight look to make sure he’s got the message. Why does the Consul fuss over him so much?

  ‘A compelling display of charity,’ says the pink diplomat.

  Well, you obviously find it more exciting than swishing your houseboys with a cane, thinks de Vèze, who can’t remember the name of the hep cat in the pink shirt.

  ‘Men, their death throes, charity which is all transcending, it’s magnificent, pure Pascal,’ says the grey diplomat holding de Vèze’s gaze.

  ‘It’s exactly what they tell Boy Scouts round camp fires or in tents,’ replies Max with his eyes fixed on the grey diplomat, ‘away with you, death throes and charity my foot!’

  Silence around the table, Max makes no effort to break it, gobbets of lung tissue, they have another game, Monsieur Goffard, with white beans and black beans, the agent for Native Affairs had said, it’s played in the souk, while the women and the old men are selling or bartering, the kids play with beans or small stones, I’ll explain later, but now we have to go, I don’t like being here, I don’t like it, it’s orders, it’s HQ that decides, they say the bombing is strategic, the Spaniards do a lot worse, they look at photos of dead or wounded comrades, then they get in their planes and give it all they’ve got, they forget everything, Pétain and Franco say it’s strategic.

  Max turns to Malraux:

  ‘What we got up to was a lot more fun than the stories they tell the Cubs!’

  Dessert has been served, a rather mushy tarte tatin, pastry rather rubbery, but with a good Sauternes, the pink diplomat likes Sauternes, it’s the first decent wine of the evening, the Beaujolais was foul, when we get home, I’ll have to tell Xavier he must do something about his habit of pulling on the lapels of his jacket, one hand on each side, to straighten his clothes, I can’t bear it, he never stops, if he believes he’s going to advance in his career behaving like that he’s got another think coming! He’s been getting more and more fidgety since the beginning of the year, and what’s all this about cutting his lettuce with his knife? I don’t really need to point it out to him, anyway there were at least four of them doing the same thing this evening, and actually I joined in so I wouldn’t be out of step with the others.

  ‘For Monsieur Clappique,’ says the grey diplomat turning to Malraux, ‘The Human Condition is “entertaining”, but that’s only the opinion of a minor character.’

  Malraux lets it go and turns to the young woman:

  ‘There’s another gift apart from the cyanide.’

  He has his elbows on the table, his hands are crossed under his chin, his face forward, he is looking upwards and the whites of his eyes are visible below the pupils, his voice is sober but there is something about the pupils that seems to suggest that he is amused.

  ‘I can’t remember any other gift,’ says the grey diplomat.

  De Vèze can’t either, although he thought he knew the novel by heart, he has forgotten, just as he has forgotten everything else he spent all those nights reading, glass of whisky at his elbow, during the war, after the war, read too quickly, reread skipping whole pages, all of Faulkner, all Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Flaubert, all Malraux, thirsting, like Malraux, as thirsty as the man whose education was cut short, could recite whole pages from memory, he can still remember odd sentences, read The Human Condition ten times, and he didn’t remember the parrots or the offer of the cyanide, it’s all he knows and he can’t think of what Malraux calls ‘the other gift’.

  ‘The caramels! It’s the gift of caramels!’ cries Max. ‘You don’t read attentively, shush! no interruptions, you never see anything! On your toes! Caramels cremes, three pages after the cyanide in the novel, when he’s about to write time regained, when Malraux himself behaves like Clappique, minor character my foot, an author who does that every three pages, children, no one gets it; right, dotty every five pages, it’s the caramels, when the Finance Minister hands round little caramels in his office in Paris to Ferrai and the bankers, chewy, stick to the teeth, it punctures the poignancy of the moment, all the selfless acts, the other twerp who offers his cyanide to the two youngsters to save them from being tossed into the boiler, a compelling moment of charity, well he’s not the only one who puts something in the collection box, the twit, the caramels, history, recto, verso, ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’ the revolution has gone down like a lead balloon, so it’s cyanide and caramels all round!’

  ‘That’s a journalist’s phrase,’ Morel interjects.

  ‘Get away with you,’ says Max, coming back at him, ‘a historian is only a journalist who looks back.’

  Pow! take that! thinks de Vèze, as half-dreaming he sees Malraux’s novel filling up with unexpected beings, a dream or something seen in a drunk’s spinning head, an old man with a head like a cat who says I sell women, a Russian with a face like Croquignol leaning on a nickel-plated bar-rail, the corpse of a strangled man dancing the dance of the veils, a lunatic beaten to death, fat girls with huge breasts huddled on top of one another, and Clappique suddenly emerging from the heap as if out of some Pandora’s box, skeletons in a trance, Hercules dressed as a woman, camera-eating rabbits, ah, if only alcohol didn’t make you feel ill, trains full of whores sent hurtling towards Communist Party headquarters by connoisseurs of the human soul, a monster part-bear, part-man and part-spider coming towards you, a young woman standing at a top-floor balcony watching the sunset, de Vèze kneeling behind her, he removes her knickers, and in the street a coachman weeps for his horses surrounded by human victims and repeats over and over, all this for nothing, for nothing, the young woman says kiss me.

  ‘I like these young people,’ says Max, ‘so modest, and they recite your work to you, they surely have great futures! Not like me, and that matelot’s broom you hung over my shoulder, I can’t forgive you that, you treat me as if I’m just some joker, you never believed I had a serious side, cyanide and caramels, recto and verso.’

  Malraux doesn’t react to this, smoothes the tablecloth by his plate, the Consul doesn’t know what to say, he thinks Goffard is getting more and more out of hand, no one should speak like that to the Minister, he shouldn’t even witness such scenes, mustn’t say anything, behave like it never happened or else intervene to stop it, but if that fails you turn into the man who drew attention to something that should never have happened in the first place.

  Max has stopped talking, his head is spinning, he feels free but not well, I burn, you eat, and then it is all repeated, everything smokes and everything is repeated, everything smokes, the people throw themselves on the ground, the red earth of the Riff, mouth full of a metallic taste, something was falling, it was like sulphur, people were going blind, their skin was turning black and peeling off, the livestock swelled up and died, plants shrivelled within hours, the people left with their animals and headed for the caves, you couldn’t drink from the streams any more, lungs flooding with white froth which asphyxiates the victims who linger for two days, it’s exactly like drowning, at first you feel nothing, then it starts with sand under your eyelids, Churchill saying ‘we were the bees of hell’, diphosgene, chloropicrin and tabun, Berenguer, Spanish High Commissioner at Tetuán, August 1922: ‘I have always been opposed to the use of combat gases against native populations, but after what they did to us at Annual I shall use them with great pleasure,’ and Alphonse XIII in 1925 to the French military attaché in Madrid: ‘We must set aside otiose humanitarian considerations, the urgent task is to exterminate the Beni Ourriaguel, even Churchill did not rule out using gas on villages in Iraq in 1919’, if chemical gases are used before the great heat of the day, they are very effective, directive of the Spanish military command: ‘I remind you once again that the regulation peri
od before entering zones on which special bombs have been dropped must be strictly observed; in a regrettable incident yesterday, sixty of our own troops were among the victims’, and the whistle of the train in Shanghai goes toot-toot every time a prisoner is fed into the boiler.

  Around the table, no one says anything. So Max:

  ‘Shush! not a word!’ Max resumes, ‘The Human Condition is the locomotive and the parrot!’

  ‘Rather,’ says the young woman, looking at de Vèze, ‘it’s the locomotive and the kangaroo.’

  Silence all round, she blushes, small red patches reaching down as far as her throat, Max has stopped moving, suddenly he seems smaller, but with him on the contrary the blood has drained from his cheeks.

  ‘You’re having us on,’ he says.

  ‘As you see, he doesn’t know everything,’ remarks Malraux.

  Morel looks at his wife as if he had never seen her before.

  ‘What kangaroo?’ asks de Vèze.

  And Max, his gaze faltering:

  ‘Where’s the kangaroo? you’re taking the piss, darling, where do you get a kangaroo?’

  Malraux, smile like a cat’s:

  ‘At the exact point where the ladies suddenly start paying close attention, tell them, Madame, while I enjoy both the pleasure of having truly serious women readers and that of tasting a truly excellent Sauternes, my compliments, Consul.’

  De Vèze raises his glass until it is level with his eyes and tilts it forward.

  ‘Now remind me, what’s the word for wine when it slides slowly down the inside of the glass, legs or tears?’

  My wife just has to look at him, thinks Morel, and he starts talking like some simpering oaf, and he’s supposed to be a French ambassador!

  ‘People say both,’ said Max, ‘legs and tears, you need both words, to keep everybody happy, the formula for success, make Wendy feel weepy and Andy feel randy, as an old boss of mine used to say before the war.’

  ‘Joker or not,’ says Malraux, ‘I never made you say anything uncouth.’

  ‘Monsieur Goffard, just let Madame tell us about the kangaroo,’ said the pink diplomat.

  *

  ‘Is it more serious than I thought?’ Lilstein asks you. ‘Is it more than just doubts you’re having? You want to stop? It’s entirely up to you, I’ve always told you that you were perfectly free, let me set your mind at rest: your withdrawal, you will note that I do not talk of defection or betrayal, your withdrawal would not make life difficult for me at all. I could replace you in Paris immediately. You can withdraw, and if some day you ever wish to renew contact, if you need information, I shall always be there.

  ‘How would I replace you? Perhaps I already have, maybe you have had a double from the beginning, not a double exactly, an understudy, someone who works with me in the same way, not with your friend the Minister but with somebody else who is also destined for high office, a man, a woman I’m having meetings with elsewhere, by the seaside, for a change, you have fears, doubts, you want to stop because you have still not got the point, you still think that I’m asking you to spy on a decision-making centre, you have no ambition, stand back, look at the wider picture: we are the centre where the decisions are made.

  ‘The two of us, nobody else, when we’re together and decide to do something nothing can stand in our way, and nobody can identify us, no gizmos to connect us, no phone, no radio, no codes, no cover, no letter-box, sleeping or otherwise, no go-betweens, no invisible ink, no cryptic grids, no microdots, no underhand stuff, if I ever stop coming here without letting you know beforehand, drop everything, at once, it will almost certainly mean that the ideas we support are going through a tough time, and me with them, never leave anything lying around that could look like evidence, everything in your head, traces yes, that’s unavoidable, but never leave evidence, they have an obsession with evidence, and never admit anything, if I disappear don’t try to find someone else to work with, “no longer mourn for me”, no regular habits, no gizmos, you buy old recordings and sell them, from time to time you place an advertisement in the Figaro, and mind, you must buy and sell for real, five or six times a year, it’s not a lot.

  ‘All I need is the classified ad, three days before the meeting, you speak English, German and Spanish, you travel a lot, you’ll have plenty of reasons, you like opera, it’s expensive, isn’t it? Opera is excellent, given the price of decent seats you can improve your general culture at the same time as cultivating your hatred of the rich, get yourself known as the sort of man who will go a thousand kilometres to hear a singer or a violinist, a few trips each year, West Germany, Austria, and you often go via Switzerland, in Zurich there are some famous record dealers, excellent second-hand bookshops, and a direct train for Waltenberg, if you decide you don’t like all that travelling any more remember you can stop whenever you like, you have an understudy, though maybe you are his understudy, suspicion falls on you, among others, nothing can ever be proved against you, which allows me to shelter your understudy who is more vulnerable behind your more high-profile self, I’m only joking.’

  *

  ‘The kangaroo is sitting on Valérie Serge’s bed in Shanghai’s biggest hotel,’ says the young woman.

  ‘Madame Serge,’ says Max, ‘good name for a high-class couturière, most ingenious.’

  ‘Baron,’ says Malraux, ‘let her speak.’

  ‘This happens at the point,’ the young woman resumes, ‘where Ferrai arranges for Valérie’s room to be filled with uncaged birds, to pay her back for the business with the rabbit, on the bed a pair of soft pyjamas, all that’s left of the woman he loved, red and gold silk, he picks them up, brushes them lightly against his cheek and starts to daydream.’

  ‘About kangaroos,’ says the pink diplomat who, as he looks towards the grey diplomat, turns a deeper shade of pink.

  ‘No,’ replies the young woman, ‘about violence, as men do who like imagining what women secretly want to have done to them, anyway, he daydreams, while on the bed where they’d made love is a handsome, real, live kangaroo, a kangaroo with eyes like a terrified doe.’

  ‘Shush! don’t say a word!’ cries Max, ‘a hairy little kangaroo, superbly constructed, my dear fellow, that’s exactly what your novel is, it’s the locomotive and the kangaroo, a kangaroo with a moustache!’

  ‘But no one,’ the young woman says, ‘apart that is from a few female readers who do not like empty beds, ever notices the kangaroo in the book, but it’s there.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why it has fewer readers today,’ Malraux observes, ‘and why journalists find me lacking in humour, don’t deny it, de Vèze.’

  ‘Ah,’ says Max, ‘it’s the absence of humour that explains why we have such large print-runs, revolutionary readers, moralists, the Classiques Larousse, right, left, Trotsky, Maurras’s faithful, but those people don’t need kangaroos, the rest of us do, I mean the fiction-reading public, in the end it all comes out, shush! don’t interrupt! that’s enough about kangaroos, today, Master, you’re on your way to the land of the talapoins, and you’re not taking me!’

  ‘Who are these talapoins?’ asks the grey diplomat.

  ‘Asian monks,’ answers Morel.

  ‘Who are Voltaireans,’ says Max.

  ‘There’s a word I’d forgotten,’ says Malraux.

  And Max:

  ‘It was me who taught you it, you want to forget because a week from now you’re scheduled to have a meeting with the great Mao, in the land of the talapoins, serious stuff in the offing, serious stuff is so depressing, I told you that Chiang Kai-Shek was going to dress the Chinese up in talapoin habits, but that was in ’27, missed the boat, it was Mao twenty years later who dressed them like that, blue talapoins, I was twenty years ahead of my time, that’s the joke, a machine for defragmenting time, just let it run, everything eventually turns into farce without any help from anybody.’

  *

  ‘I never asked you for any sort of bureaucratic involvement,’ Lilstein tells you, ‘you ca
n put an end to it whenever you wish, it’s a man-to-man relationship, Menschheit, young gentleman of France, do you know what my department is called? it’s the Aufklärung, where you come from they say Lumières, enlightenment, what is my role in the Aufklärung. I never told you? I never hide anything from you, I have no official role in the set-up, don’t really have an office, but all the big files pass through my hands, I answer only to the Minister who knows that I don’t really answer to him at all but to a direct line, further to the East. Officially, my area of responsibility is international trade, I work hard at it, especially with our cousins in Bonn, they rather like me, I hint that I do more than just trade, that I am a man of shadows, that I have power, they think I’m either a boaster or a stirrer.

  ‘Ever read the letter Kant wrote on the Enlightenment? Wonderful stuff! “Dare to think!” You and I are Enlightenment Men, you too have an ideal, like all these people who are monkeys dangling on the stick of their particular ideal, but you are no monkey, you are an actor, you ask me how I’d translate Menschheit? As something between humanity and virility, not to worry, the sort of virility that has nothing to do with fascism.

  ‘Though actually not virility, that’s a bit strong, it’s rather the simple fact of being a man, you could just say “humanity” but with an element of “integrity”, think I’m exaggerating? There’s also a notion of “fellowship” to it or again … not easy … it’s daring to stand up and be counted as a man, to take that risk, it’s somewhere between human and hero, between artifice and being true to your word … but not a halfway house, it’s rather a third shore, everything we do is third shore.