Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  No embassy, deputy in charge of a sub-department, and a three-roomed flat in the rue Vaneau, on the second floor, windows overlooking the courtyard, I prefer being on my own, she can go and mutter ‘no’ at people in the street or travellers on the métro, actually, she’ll go back to her bloody country-living, with rubber boots, rubber gloves, rubber head, and mind you change your shoes as you come in, the Consul looks at his wife, smiles to encourage her to keep smiling in the midst of all the wreckage.

  De Vèze says to Malraux:

  ‘Nabokov is too clever by half.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  Malraux has pushed his chair back, he has folded his arms, polite expression on his face, an end-of-the-friendship politeness, these were most likely the last words he would speak that evening and he even looks as if he blames de Vèze, de Vèze isn’t at all sure why he said Nabokov was too clever by half, he’d felt things were about to take a turn for the worse, so he came out with a smart remark, and now he’s landed himself in a fix, he searches for a phrase incorporating ‘destiny’ and ‘literature’.

  ‘A cliché,’ he says, ‘is one form of destiny.’

  De Vèze has the feeling he’s not going to get anywhere.

  ‘I don’t follow,’ says the pink diplomat.

  Shut up, thinks the Consul, just shut up.

  ‘I don’t understand either,’ cuts in Morel who is beginning to like de Vèze less and less.

  That makes two of you, thinks de Vèze, three with the grey man who is pretending he understands, and four with me until I come up with something.

  Those two make a funny pair, thinks Morel, glancing at the pink-and-grey couple, at least they’re not ogling my wife, unlike this other character who’s never succeeded in escaping from his legend, an embassy in Rangoon, a battle in 1942, he thinks it entitles him to undress other men’s wives.

  Morel would like to provoke an incident, yes that would be good, an incident would make people forget all about the tension between Malraux and Goffard, Mister Ambassador, my wife’s neckline seems to interest you, once at a dinner Morel saw a woman with the courage to create an incident, are you going to sweep my husband off his feet now or can it wait? Who do these people think they are, they believe they can have anything because they are waited on at table, have a chauffeur-driven car, Morel cannot stand the breed, the title demeans, the function stultifies, he has known people who rang far truer, heroic but not self-important, who had gone back to their jobs as typesetters or pointsmen without hawking their medals around some ministry, Flaubert was right, Morel feels like hitting his wife.

  ‘But this destiny thing is really quite simple, children,’ says Max.

  He lifts one finger and pauses.

  Goffard to my rescue, thinks de Vèze, Goffard knows that these days without Malraux he is nothing more than an old man who is about to be forgotten by history, he has written thousands of newspaper articles, one occasionally worth a page of Malraux, but it’s journalism, none of it will last.

  ‘All our heroes die,’ continues Max, ‘victims of destiny, as they say in cheap novels.’

  ‘Of destiny and repetition,’ says de Vèze.

  ‘They die, History repeats itself,’ adds Max.

  The young woman says nothing, all the guests have now raised their heads again, the Consul has finished his coffee, he plays with a pipe-cleaner, turning it between thumb and forefinger like an aeroplane propeller.

  ‘A cliché,’ says de Vèze carefully, though without knowing really what he’s saying, ‘is the portion of destiny in what we write.’

  ‘That’s clichés sorted out, then,’ says Max, ‘and that’s why in Shanghai the tension is always terrible and the rain unfailingly Chinese and Nabokov is wrong, well spotted, Monsieur de Vèze, your phrasing is a touch awkward but if you’d like to do a book of interviews with the Master you’ve cracked it, and you’ve come to my rescue.’

  ‘Come now, the idea that clichés are unavoidable is an old idea of Paulhan’s,’ says Malraux, who smiles again.

  ‘Readers are morons,’ cries Max, ‘they’re too busy sniffing out clichés to see the kangaroos!’

  ‘You mustn’t deny Monsieur de Vèze the pithiness of his axiom,’ says the young woman.

  Morel does not care at all for the way his wife defends the man, but he knows there’s nothing he can do about it, nothing has gone right this evening, an insignificant moron, that’s what you are to these people, your expertise, all you know about the peasantry in the eighteenth century, they couldn’t care less, they have the power, they invite you, you give lectures, you have dinner in Singapore, beautiful plates, they separate you from your wife, tomorrow they’ll tell you that you were rather grim.

  ‘Monsieur de Vèze has a very elegant way of rescuing clichés,’ says the young woman.

  I’m going to go for the foot, de Vèze decides, but not with my shoe on. How can she possibly have hands like that? Bigger, heavier than you’d expect, lips that smile, hands that don’t mess about.

  ‘Well I at least wasn’t a cliché,’ says Max.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asks Malraux, ‘cliché, pastiche, imitation, it goes to the very heart of the thing, writers don’t express themselves, they imitate, what is the writer’s raw material? The work of other writers, and the cliché is what remains of them at the level of language.’ Malraux, chin cupped in his left hand, right hand in the air, forefinger pointing, you have first to write down the adjective ‘terrible’ so that you can be free of it, you imitate, the finger lands on the table, there’s no stopping him now, Malraux is launched, de Vèze presses the toe of his left shoe against the heel of his right shoe.

  ‘It’s better than not writing a novel at all, just because you’re afraid of adjectives, isn’t that so, Baron?’ Malraux’s voice is a hiss.

  ‘But you had a very good story to tell in those days, Kappler had told me about it, in the offices of Preuves, the fear of adjectives, you need to stand back a little.’

  Malraux draws a line on the table with his finger.

  ‘You pastiche and you isolate the tenth which isn’t imitated, and then you try to make sure the rest matches that tenth.’

  Malraux has moved back, his hands above the plate begin to caress the thought like a conscientious potter.

  ‘You go beyond pastiche, you play around with it, the opening of my novel, Baron…’

  Little by little the fullness and the affection return to his voice: ‘Obviously it’s like a crime thriller, ordinary, night, car horns, suspense, you must ensure the reader’s hair stands on end, nothing to feel ashamed of, take Hugo, Les Misérables, the tension that hits you in the stomach.’

  Malraux’s hands are together again, one index finger extended: ‘It’s a pastiche of a crime novel, or of Laclos.’

  Slowly de Vèze eases off his right shoe.

  ‘Valerie is a small-scale Merteuil,’ says Max with a smile.

  ‘That’s right,’ says Malraux, ‘you pastiche Faulkner or twenties Russian novelists, your overripe pastiche becomes a filter which you use to look at the world through new eyes.’

  Malraux puts his left hand up to his eyes with his fingers spread wide, like bars.

  ‘You look at Shanghai through a haze of pulp crime fiction, or you strain the Pensées through the Pieds Nickelés’ – the right hand up now, also with the fingers out wide, held against the left, like a trellis – ‘a double filter, Filochard and the two infinites, put it all together and you get a decent book.’

  He puts out both arms in front of him, forefinger extended on each hand, he beats time to his words with nods of his head, his face forward, chin in, pupils raised to compensate, eyes wide open:

  ‘It takes a writer years before he can write with the sound of his own voice, get past other people’s voices, at any rate his own is there, and if you don’t pastiche as you imitate you’re just a parrot, you rewrite Maupassant or Turgenev without realising it or pretending you’ve forgotten, like Nabokov or your frie
nd Kappler, Baron.’

  Malraux’s left hand is on the table, arched like a spider, on the tips of the fingers.

  ‘And it doesn’t have kangaroos!’

  ‘It also lacks cats,’ says the young woman, displaying the large black cat which has jumped unnoticed on to her lap.

  De Vèze decides that a woman who reduces him to this state in the middle of a dinner with Malraux is a pearl without price. At last he manages to slide his foot out of his right shoe.

  A faint crackle in the sky, above the young woman’s head, the first star, the star that favours the bold, a draught of air blows under the table, cools the sock, the floor of the veranda is warm.

  ‘They say I don’t do cats very well in my stories,’ says Malraux.

  He has backed his chair away, hands crossed on his knees, face down again, eyes looking up, he waits.

  ‘That’s not true,’ asserts the young woman stroking the animal, ‘actually, cats are your double.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ de Vèze asks belligerently.

  He’s not angry with her, not as he was a while back when he could have told her to go to hell, now he’s scared, scared that he’ll start thinking again what a blue-stocking she is, that she’s read too many books, one of those women who pass their time picking you up on everything you say, a friend of his lived with a woman like that for twenty years, he’s now in an asylum, scared to separate from her, scared to stop wanting her body, and now she comes out with this business of a double, and everyone is all agog because the minute you start talking about doubles at a dinner party people think you must be very smart.

  ‘When Kyo watches Monsieur Clappique in the Black Cat, you describe the scene from a point of view that places you behind Kyo, who moves like a cat,’ the young woman says to Malraux, ‘and behind Clappique, in the background, there is the glow from the luminous outline of a cat which is watching us, which means that the scene is enacted between two cats.’

  Malraux smiles, a rare expression on his face, never in photos, the delight of a cat who’s been at the cream, perhaps a few woman are entitled to see this expression.

  ‘Cat to the front!’

  Max has shouted out.

  ‘Cat to the rear! Cat everywhere. Raminagrobis be with us!’

  A sudden hush, Max stares at his plate, everyone is looking at him, he remains silent, the Consul starts fiddling with his pipe-cleaner again, Max doesn’t look at anyone, could these people guess how kids used to play with cats in the back streets of Rabat? Lyautey played croquet, the kids played shooting-star cats, in the towns, not in the Riff, there weren’t any animals left in the Riff, nothing edible, like us in the trenches, a cat you caught was called a rabbit, the agent for Native Affairs said they don’t even have standard scarcity fare, no wild artichokes, mallow stems, prickly pears, roots, nor tobacco or hashish to beguile hunger, hunger eats at your muscles, what with the bombs and hunger they eventually gave up, they came down hoping to get something to eat, they had nothing left to sell, they traded parts of their clothes, in certain douars in the Riff there wasn’t a single man left alive, the women sold themselves, we behaved very decently, we staged surrender ceremonies, large gatherings, the colours of France and the flag of the Shereef, the whole shooting match.

  An order, atten-shun! heels click, brains close, the conquered standing in a semi-circle, bugles, drums, let the ceremony begin, it’s called the targuiba, the conquered chief brings a bull to the conquering chief, a single stroke with a knife, hamstring severed, the bull collapses, thrashes around, and thus the violence ends, allegiance sworn, pardon given, bull on its side, ten men to hold it, bull kicking out, a thrust of the knife to slit its throat, it’s the only thing moving in front of the crowd which watches it die, the violence drains away through the aorta, the smell of warm blood in the noses of those in the front rows, if the tribe didn’t have a bull then the military government provided the sacrificial beast, to be paid for in kind by forced labour, Bournazel was there, with his Arab scouts, no, he didn’t die during the Riff wars, that was later, further south.

  Foot of the Sargho hills, March 1933, very simple, he charges and takes a bullet in the stomach, legend has it that Giraud had ordered him to wear a grey djellaba over his red cloak, that took away his baraka, from the notebook of Dr Vial: ‘At the orifice made by the bullet I found a very large intestinal and peritoneal hernia, already strangulated and its pedicle twisted, extremely painful’, Bournazel’s nose looks pinched, bloodless lips, ‘I’m cold, Doctor, I’m a long time dying, what a bloody way to go’, that was it, had he kept his red cloak on? The shooting-star cats in the back streets of Rabat, the youngsters dipped their tails in oil, put a match to them, such brilliant flashes in the night, with added sound effects.

  Max waves his right hand slowly in the air, watches it, comes out with one last phrase:

  ‘The Cheshire cat from Alice’s Wonderland!’

  ‘Alice played croquet too,’ said the young woman.

  She looks at de Vèze, he says nothing, he’s so gauche, he’d like to sleep with me, it’s obvious what he means by sleeping: it means taking, then disappearing, and reappearing whenever he fancies, though there’d be a few walks together, at the beginning, and then you’d forget, Mr Good-Looking, you are so manly and I expect that when you can’t do what you want a third time, you too will throw your pillow against the wall.

  ‘The cat is the spirit of the place,’ concludes the young woman. ‘And of the writing,’ says Malraux.

  ‘Who does this thieving tom belong to?’ asks the young woman as she prevents the cat getting its nose into her plate.

  ‘To me,’ says Max, ‘it was a present from my author, I take him with me wherever I go, otherwise he yowls and upsets the guests at the hotel.’

  ‘What did you call him?’ the young woman asks Malraux. ‘Orpheus,’ says Malraux, ‘I have one just like him in Paris, but I didn’t have time to teach this one his manners.’

  De Vèze tells himself that he will put his foot on the young woman’s foot and do it as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she will throw the contents of her wineglass in his face, no, all she’ll do is shoot him a withering look, why not wait for a better opportunity? Why not wait ten years while you’re about it? You spend your life waiting, waiting to go away, waiting for a woman, you could wait for her to make all the moves, dream about it, where did I read that? A dinner, Louis XV, a man keeps staring at a woman sitting opposite him, he tries to be brilliant, witty remarks, best wines, the woman removes her shoe under the table and places her foot on the man’s crotch, he has no idea what to do, can a woman really do that? You can dream about it and wait and then go away with nothing.

  Max looks at de Vèze:

  ‘A cat is less trouble than a kangaroo.’

  Malraux:

  ‘The kangaroo in the bedroom watching Ferrai, it’s because I needed something a touch grotesque, between the lines.’

  ‘Only writing can still do that,’ adds Max, ‘in the cinema, a one-second shot of the kangaroo would be enough to get the whole audience laughing while Ferrai is dreaming that he’s tearing Valerie limb from limb and devouring the pieces.’

  ‘Actually I didn’t write it quite in that spirit,’ Malraux corrects him.

  ‘No matter,’ says Max, ‘there’s a hint of Bluebeard in there, and also of kangaroo.’

  ‘It wasn’t done to lower the tension,’ said Malraux, eyes down, right palm up towards Clappique, ‘it was for comic relief, it doesn’t go anywhere.’

  ‘Ferral’s mistake,’ says the young woman, ‘was to think we are little girls he could butcher and gobble up.’

  She looks at de Vèze, thinks he looks like Ferrai, only better, on the far side of folly, would he be capable of gobbling a person up? Can he do anything else? He’d like to eat me up, and it wouldn’t be too unpleasant to be his supper for one evening, but could he also walk down the rue Lepic eating cherries out of a paper bag that we’d be sharing? It would be o
ur first walk together, then on another day, when we’re a bit more used to each other, we could buy shrimps, the little grey ones, wash them in the fountain ourselves and eat them just as they are, while we watch the world go by, he’d learn that there’s more to life than erections, why not give it a try? Philippe is so distant, he sits there facing me, if it were someone else instead of him it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to anything.

  He doesn’t love me, he wanted to get married, that’s all, when I was little I wanted to marry a hero, what boldness is he capable of now, apart from the way he stares, what test could I set him? He says we’re equals, we both work, we earn practically the same amount, he takes the rubbish out, but for him a loving wife is a woman who lives entirely through what her husband does.

  He says he’s all mine, but everything I like in life I’m supposed to feel through him, all the other couples we know, modern women, they all know their husbands’ careers inside out, the wife who tells you straight out exactly what her hubby isn’t after: the Cochin job, the Sorbonne professorship or the chairmanship, so-and-so is a bastard, especially when so-and-so is the hubby’s rival, hubby smiles, darling you mustn’t exaggerate so, he takes the bin out half the time, he’s the one who chooses where we go when we travel, he never cried when I passed my exams, ah! so you are Morel’s wife, and Morel always out in front.