Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  ‘Was I in love with the woman who made me dance the waltz and the tango thirty years ago? For a Frenchman you ask very direct questions, I do hope that when you ask your friend the Minister questions you aren’t so sharp with him, there was a swimming pool in the hotel even in those days, small blue tiles, burnished copper handrails, round windows, she was at full stretch in the water, on her back, moving over the surface, chin tucked in, head very mobile, finely arched neck, she was swimming lengths, leaving swirls of foam where she beat her feet, arm movements very expansive, not at all fast, it was a very new stroke at the time, I stayed out of the water, I didn’t want to swim with her, all I’ve ever been able to manage was a sort of doggy paddle, sometimes she asked me to time her, or sometimes I’d leave, I’d go down into the maintenance gallery which ran all round the pool, that’s where the round windows were.

  ‘I’d watch her body, the way her abdomen swelled was captivating, she couldn’t see me, she must have suspected I was there, she behaved as if she couldn’t see me, her muscles were long and she was beginning to thicken around the middle, she’d do fifty lengths without stopping, she said she had to do the backstroke, a singer always works standing up, she had to take care of her spine, when I stood by the little round window at the end of the pool I could see her coming towards me head first, when she turned and set off again I was just on a level with her legs, when she finished I’d bring her bathrobe, I deliberately set it down some distance from her so that I could go to her and watch her as she came to me, at the time the other women said that her legs and her shoulders were deeply unattractive, too many muscles, you may well smile, mustn’t let our Linzer get cold. Really? You don’t understand what I meant by the third shore?’

  Confronted by your dejection and your uncertainties, Lilstein eventually came out with this rather harsh thought:

  ‘When people like us lose their nerve, they become as pathetic as everybody else, that’s what lies in wait for us.’

  *

  ‘There was another tomfool story,’ adds Max, ‘the one about the man who wanted to send whole trainloads of prostitutes to Communist Party headquarters.’

  ‘It was to soften them up,’ said Malraux.

  Max looks right into Malraux’s eyes:

  ‘According to what the Americans are saying just now about the great Helmsman and his whims, several coachloads must have got there, whole compartments crammed with little Lolitas for the comrade President who hasn’t seen what he’s got dangling south of his paunch for many a year, they’ve been trained to go looking for it.’

  De Vèze observes the young woman, Goffard is out of order, doesn’t know how to behave around a dinner table, too much alcohol, de Vèze wonders if the young woman will blush again, he imagines her with Mao, looking for it, she has her back against the twilight, hair almost black, the white of her shoulder, of her cleavage, the yellow dress, the clear look, the oh-so soft line of her chin, like a child’s, if there were some of those cattleyas so beloved of tourists on the table I could stare at the pistil, that would be as vulgar as you could wish for, what the hell’s she doing with a historian?

  It’s settled, at midnight de Vèze will reach out and take the young woman’s hand in his, but he’s not nineteen any more, he’s not sitting next to her but opposite, surely I’m not going to have to play footsie under the table like some damned Russian? What else can I do? Wait for tomorrow? Pay formal court to her? By then she’ll have gone away with her historian, goodbye brioche, her backside, assume softly swelling curves.

  ‘Lolitas,’ says Malraux, ‘Baron, that’s such a cliché!’

  De Vèze taken aback, Malraux thrown off-balance, Goffard has gone overboard with Mao who is to receive Malraux in Peking.

  ‘A cliché,’ Malraux says again, ‘Baron, you disappoint me, I wouldn’t have thought you had this amazing appetite for CIA or Soviet tittle-tattle.’

  Amazing appetite, de Vèze repeats to himself, coming from Malraux that means he is treating Goffard as an agent provocateur, a reputation he’s been stuck with ever since the thirties, and the accusation is very Gaullist, the CIA and the KGB in the same bag, Lolitas was the word too far.

  De Vèze, the Consul, the grey diplomat, all the guests try to find some way of changing the subject, but they can’t think of anything, don’t really want to, would prefer not to be there, can’t be helped, something is definitely going on, no one can resist a tasty revelation, they don’t say anything, they stand back and let it come, wrapped in its own shadow.

  In the years between the wars, the albatross around Goffard’s neck was the Russians and no one else, he was very critical of them but his information, which he got from Moscow, was first rate; and on Morocco he was every bit as well informed as the English journalists on The Times, everybody knows that Times correspondents also reported back to the Intelligence Service, Goffard touted information between Paris, London and Moscow, but no one in the final analysis knew on whose behalf.

  Many would have liked to ask him face-to-face, but he played poker with Briand and Berthelot, and later with Daladier and Chamberlain, yes, in Munich, with half the ministers of Europe, so sitting here at the same table as Malraux is no big deal for him, he was taught by Bergson at Henri-IV, he was there in 1919 when Lloyd George remarked while looking at a map of Czechoslovakia ‘it’s not a country, it’s a sausage’, he undertook an unofficial tour through Europe for Briand, in 1928, the Pan-European Movement, very close also to Lyautey, he never succeeded in reconciling him with Briand.

  Basically Briand agreed with Lyautey, but he hated him, had done so since 1916 when Lyautey had got the better of him in a Cabinet meeting. In Morocco, Goffard chummed up with the agents for Native Affairs who had been trained by Lyautey, he knew everything that was happening on the ground, the Spaniards were suspicious of him, he had managed to get his hands on a general order given by a coronel, collect all bomb debris, don’t leave any lying around, if necessary the Spaniards would buy back any such debris from the same Riffians who had been under them when they fell, they used gloves to handle them, no, gas wasn’t used at Chefchaouen, there they just dropped 100-kilo bombs, French sector, a town full of women, a strategic air raid, there’s no evidence that the French used gas anywhere in their sector, Pétain was prepared to, to hurry things along, but Chambrun said no, those air raids broke the Riffians.

  The women especially. They were fearsome, like the Gaulish women Caesar tells of, they got the men fired up with songs deriding cowards.

  But after Chefchaouen they began to calm down, it was high time they did, the cataclysm was fast approaching, at headquarters there was talk of abandoning Fez, the trough of a wave, or rather a snowball, a Mediterranean country with lots of snowballs will … snowball, the parts merge, overnight thousands of men lining up behind Abd el-Krim, an impetus that carries all before it, an avalanche, a rolling snowball army, he even tried to create a state, a snowball state, he had begun as a good and faithful servant, an adviser to the Spanish governor, a journalist on the Telegrama del Rif, they were later dubbed the ‘Beni-oui-oui’, he could have taken a well-earned retirement, after thirty years of publishing jackal-bites-man stories in Spanish newspapers, he had no choice but to rebel, found himself between a country bent on destroying itself with vendettas and not overly civilised civilisers who let you see their motor cars and their aeroplanes and remind you at every turn that you, Abd el-Krim el-Khattabi, are still an ignorant savage; you end up thinking that this is the only reason they are there, to remind you.

  And the French talk about the Spaniards the way the Spaniards talk about you, Abd el-Krim, trash, they also talk about you the way they talk about the Spaniards, but not Lyautey, and in France there are French people who actually sing your praises, you are a small liberty-loving people which would like to live in the twentieth century but without having settlers landed on you, the Riff Republic, Spanish officers sometimes talked about their own men, their Basques, their Catalans, their Andalusians from
Jaén the way they talked about the natives, each level borrowing its contempt from the level above it.

  Abd el-Krim probably didn’t know exactly what he’d got into, he was a snowball too, chérif zaïm, fqih, raïs, amir, khalifat, mawlana, sidna, ghazi, he’d picked up every title as he went along, even sultan.

  Sometimes a strict old-style Muslim, no tobacco, no marabout, no dancing on hot coals, the right hand of thieves, the five prayers.

  At other times he looks across at Turkey, Mustafa Kemal’s fresh start, it’s the religion of our fathers that has landed us in this mess, in four centuries we have not even been able to nail a long handle on to a brush and turn it into a broom, true, but at least Abd el-Krim didn’t force that business with the cap on his Riffians, outside villages in certain parts of Turkey there was a gallows, with a real rope and a pile of caps; when they came to the village the peasants had to exchange their turbans for caps, there was a choice of caps.

  Very complicated all these roles, but Abd el-Krim doesn’t reject any of them, khalifat is virtually a successor to the Prophet, as sultan he replaces the Sultan of Morocco who is not best pleased, rid me of this rebel he is supposed to have said to Pétain, ghazi just means conqueror, a fqih is a holy man, amir is the director of the faithful but raïs is a secular chief, a sort of president.

  Zaïm is what the English call a leader, sidna and mawlana are very traditional, somewhere between yer lordship and Our Lord, Abd el-Krim makes the most of them all, a mythical city, and he doesn’t take anything for granted, swings of a pendulum, the Spaniards invade us, the tribes rise up, I use the insurrection to show the Spaniards that I’m indispensable, I demonstrate to the French that they need my support, I convince the Spaniards that they must negotiate, I mix holy war and Turkish-style revolution, the Europeans don’t get the idea for five years, inconceivable that these people can fight to become something different from what we want them to become, Moscow’s hand is behind it all, London’s gold, and the voice of Berlin, a voice you could hear in beleaguered French outposts, came from the rebel lines, spoken in German by deserters from the Legion, ‘come on you Riffians, by God, you got no balls!’

  The Germans are prevented from crossing the Rhine, so they come to the Riff to stab the French in the back.

  That said, they also helped the Spaniards: a purpose-built turnkey plant at Melilla for making Yperite and tabun, around ten thousand gas-bombs dropped in three years, Abd el-Krim believes France is incapable of undertaking a war, he gathers many men to him, those who come, those who don’t come and are compelled to come, those he bribes – who sometimes prove more loyal than those who came in the flush of enthusiasm and will run away at the first setback – he also has hostages, as we do, a real snowball, but the snowball will come to a stop when it gets to the bottom of the hill, when it reaches the plain, where the great cities are which he does not dare to capture, woe to those who have forsaken their fields for the town, Goffard knew all that, they called him The African, and thirty years later he was also one of the first to get his hands on a copy of the Khrushchev report, it was his big scoop, it suited the interests of far too many people.

  ‘The CIA and the KGB,’ continues Malraux, ‘are hand in hand, the Atlanticists and the Soviets, talking of Adanticists, Baron, your friend Kappler, still as close to the Americans, is he?’

  Max, face white, Malraux goes on:

  ‘Kappler, difficult man, but instead of sticking to being difficult with women he had to poke his nose into politics, and now no one ever knows where he is, a friendly visit to the Russian zone in ’47, neither here nor there, but he couldn’t not return to the East in ’56, did you discuss it? Which of you showed the other the Khrushchev report? Kappler going to live in the East after fighting the communists by the side of the CIA.’

  ‘Along with you, Master,’ said Max.

  ‘True,’ says Malraux, ‘that business with Preuves, I wrote for Preuves, with Sperber, in about ’52, ’53, and with Kappler too, a great review, on the side of freedom.’

  ‘Which had some very unusual financial backing.’

  Malraux, without picking up on this remark:

  ‘But Kappler certainly pulled the wool over our eyes, going off to live in the East in ’56, after Budapest!’

  ‘He only stayed three years,’ says Max.

  ‘He left for Switzerland in ’59,’ adds Malraux, ‘and today his name crops up in CIA reviews, the reviews which publish him are subsidised by the Americans, a man for all seasons.’

  ‘It’s because he is a man of sincerity,’ says Max.

  ‘A man of every sincerity going,’ says Malraux.

  ‘He was incapable of telling the necessary lie.’ Max has stopped clowning. ‘But we’re getting away from the subject, Master: Peking, the Great Helmsman and the little Lolitas.’

  The two people around this table who have known each other longest are Goffard and Malraux, almost half a century of friendship, and they are now about to quarrel terminally, when Malraux said ‘cliché’ and ‘tittle-tattle’, he lowered his eyes, not wanting to see the man who had taken him in hand in the twenties, and Max too has had enough of his author, whole decades start falling under the hammer, an orgy of destruction, each man destroying what he had once meant to the other, I leave you my old clothes, enjoy, Lolitas, tittle-tattle, it’s all meaningless, because it was him, tearing each other apart for the same absence of reason, because it was like this, because it was like that, or because they’d got too carried away, or because they’d never really been friends, or because one day the powers-that-be decide they don’t like the edge one of you has over the other, or because what they had originally destroyed in order to become friends has reared its head again, what exactly is it that’s been kept hidden for so long?

  ‘Clichés, tittle-tattle,’ repeats Malraux who has a reputation for his clinical approach to clean breaks, ‘it’s just snooping.’

  Malraux doesn’t mention the word ‘Lolitas’, but it’s all those present around the table are thinking about, suddenly he relaxes, smiles, looks up at Max again and wags a forefinger at him:

  ‘A story for you, your turn to listen, a poor man who had neither land nor a flock to watch, this happens in Bali, he finds a tortoise who can talk, he tells everyone about it, the king has him arrested and orders the tortoise to be brought to him, the tortoise refuses to say anything, the king has the poor man strangled, then the tortoise starts to speak, ‘woe to him who, having nothing to watch over, can’t even watch his tongue!’

  Max smiles, says nothing more, the Consul makes the most of the opportunity:

  ‘Basically, Minister, the tortoise is the tittle-tattle, the cliché which ultimately traps the gossip-monger.’

  ‘Talking of clichés and Lolitas, Master,’ asks Max, setting his wineglass down, ‘do you know what Nabokov said about our novel?’ An old hand at debating, de Vèze says to himself, never reply to an accusation, bat the question back, but this time you’re heading for a fall.

  ‘Nabokov is often interesting,’ says Malraux, ‘but if you’re going to tell me about him, then it’s bound to be some nasty crack or an item of gossip.’

  This time Malraux has spoken without looking at Max.

  ‘Nabokov said,’ Max ploughs on, ‘that The Human Condition, with its Chinese rain, Chinese nights, Chinese streets, Chinese crowds is the Great International Cliché Company, he suggests readers try it in Belgian: “they went out into the Belgian night”.’

  De Vèze reckons Goffard won’t go on being a character in a book for much longer, no one talks like that to Malraux.

  A definite bust-up, everyone goes quiet, the Consul and his wife are not there, they are fiddling with spoons in their coffee cups, decidedly they are not among those present at a bust-up which has Malraux at its centre, that sort of thing can cost you dear, if Malraux asks the Consul to throw Goffard out, Goffard knows a great many people, he survived the Hindenburg disaster, and if Goffard refuses to go then Malraux will stand up
and accuse the Consul of luring him into an ambush, and this was the Consul’s last chance to have this Consulate made up to a full Embassy.

  It’s the fault of the Beaujolais, light, bland, they’d drunk it like water, a bust-up, and in front of Xavier, a junior attaché maybe, but he already has the ear of the Secretary-General and the Minister, he’ll go far, with that inquisitorial look and his little monkey-arse beard, they’re fast-tracking him, it’s his private life, because they know they can get rid of him at any time, he’s a threat to nobody, he’ll go far, he’s not the sort who’ll speak up for me in Paris when what’s happened around this table gets out in a couple of hours, you can trust them, they didn’t drink too much of the Sauternes.

  It’s this middling Beaujolais that did it, the Consul should have opened the last of his Gevrey-Chambertin, there would have been just three bottles on the table but at least you don’t glug Gevrey-Chambertin, if you do it hits you in the back of the throat, he should never have listened to his wife who wanted to keep those three bottles of Gevrey to celebrate his coming promotion, after all Malraux is only passing through, and he only drinks pastis, everyone knows that, and now there’s been a major incident at the consular dinner table, still the Sauternes mixed with too much Beaujolais can’t have helped much, a major incident at my table, and we’ll drink the Gevrey-Chambertin when we have to do our flit, ‘Belgian night’, that’s under the belt, and the others are in a funk too, they won’t do anything, what went through my wife’s head, nothing, nothing ever goes through her head.

  She’s like that, I only had to mention the Gevrey-Chambertin for her to say no, I should have said let’s have the Beaujolais, and she’d have said no we’d better bring out the best bottles, and then Goffard would have behaved himself, she’s been saying the opposite of what I say for more than thirty years, I should have left her while there was still time, when I discussed it with Jean-Claude, he said she makes you angry because she’s always arguing, and she’ll make you angrier and angrier, but if you do leave her it’ll be worse, because you’ll still be angry but you won’t have any reasons to be, yes, but this time that’s it, an incident, I know it doesn’t sound much, old man, I wouldn’t give your little incident a second thought, everyone knows what Malraux is like, this sort of thing is quickly forgotten, but as I was reminded by the Minister who is so sorry that he cannot see you, the essence of the diplomat’s work is a capacity for avoiding incidents, recall to Paris.