Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  ‘All right I’ll make it blackbirds,’ says Hans, ‘males or maybe females, I need something to liven up the background.’

  ‘Use rooks, I’ve no idea why but rooks seem to me to be more noble than blackbirds. Hans, we’re not getting anywhere.’

  ‘Did you or did you not put me in charge of sets and props? Right then. So what jobs do they do?’

  ‘She’s a nurse and midwife and he’s a schoolteacher.’

  ‘You’re full of surprises.’

  ‘He quickly realises that she is drifting.’

  ‘Max!… And does he already know that she has just been left badly shaken by a first love affair?’

  ‘He’ll soon find out.’

  ‘Yo! An affair with a married man…’

  ‘I can’t hide anything from you.’

  There’s only one way for Max to get out of this corner, and that is to ensure that the rest follows plausibly from this start which you might call novelettish, the only drawback being, if it’s true, that people always guess everything, but maybe they’ll like it even so. So how does the rest go?

  ‘The rest? Thomas will take Hélène back home with him where they need someone just like her, this won’t happen without the cat being set among the pigeons, a Swiss woman in the middle of Haute-Savoie.’

  ‘She’ll be terrified by your Savoyards, Max, she’ll want to bring hygiene to the natives, to those one-room mountain hovels, cow on one side, humans on the other, a channel in the middle for the slurry, and the cow’s tail attached with a line to ensure she doesn’t spray too much, they’ll have to wash, so there’ll be confrontations in the offing, and the sheep sleeping under the bed, and the empty racks where they put the hay, and all those wonderful objects…’

  ‘Talking of objects, Hans, did you know that in those parts the barber still charges you thirty centimes extra for the “spoon”?’

  ‘What “spoon”?’

  ‘He slides it into your mouth to make your cheek swell out for the razor.’

  ‘And if you don’t want the spoon?’

  ‘He does it with his thumb.’

  ‘Scheisse!’

  ‘There must be the equivalent in your part of the world.’

  ‘In the South, in Bavaria, but we must get on.’

  ‘Thomas settles Hélène there,’ says Max, ‘but we’ve forgotten something, the boat trip, from Geneva to Évian, there’s nothing quite like it.’

  ‘You’re right, the boat is called The Simplon, it was commissioned in 1911, it sails in a triangle serving Geneva, Ouchy and Évian, it’s white, very wide, with one big paddle-wheel on each side, displacement two thousand eight hundred tons, can carry more than a thousand passengers; from the side, the sloped yellow-and-black funnel gives her a racing look, and in the prow, when there’s fog, youngsters can imagine they’re on an ocean-going liner ploughing through the spray on the high seas.’

  ‘I was forgetting that in another life Monsieur Kappler was a marine engineer.’

  ‘It’s a thing of unalloyed beauty, Max, when you stand in the middle of the lower deck and get a good look at the Winterthur mechanism the builder left open to the elements: two steel rods each two metres long are propelled horizontally from the boiler and thrust into the cast-iron cradle which receives them, they are then pulled back by an invisible hand before being pushed forward once more, they alternate, a mixture of fury and concentration, turning the axle of the paddle-wheels by means of two enormous cranks, two great asymmetrical blocks of steel which once they start rotating first check then boost the thrust, and over each joint of the whole mechanism, over each friction point, is a glass jar with a brass cap full of oil which keeps all moving parts lubricated, a pretty amber-coloured oil.’

  ‘That’s more than enough about your Winterthur, we must get on, Hans, we must start climbing and install our couple up in the mountains, in a village a thousand metres high.’

  ‘You want me to do it for you?’

  Max takes his friend by the arm and makes as if to move him along: ‘Must get on.’

  ‘Did he marry her?’

  ‘Not straight away.’

  ‘We’ll have to explain how they settle in, the formalities, how a foreign national can take her place in a French village, Max, but it’ll be static, any ideas for livening it up?’

  ‘A trollop.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A trollop, the one who was there before.’

  ‘In the schoolteacher’s life?’

  ‘The daughter of a factory-owner in the valley, also a Protestant.’

  ‘With big feet?’

  ‘No, I was told she was beautiful, a bit on the thin side by rural standards, but beautiful, she made their lives impossible.’

  ‘That’s good, very good! In Germany, women wouldn’t dare. What does it mean in those parts, made their lives impossible?’

  ‘One morning, Hélène found thirty villagers on the doorstep of the house she’d been allocated, grim faces, the most awful scene. Hans, do you know who all those ladies were?’

  Around them, statues of the queens of France, Hans looks up at Catherine de Medici, profile, shoulders, his mind wanders; twenty metres away, under the trees, girls wearing frocks are playing tennis, they’ve strung a red rope between two tree trunks, they shout, they don’t have the proper footwear, one of them has just come from the fountain carrying a bucket, the bucket has a hole in it, it lets water escape in a thin jet, the girl carrying the bucket redraws the markings of their court with the jet of water, where have these tennis-playing young women come from?

  ‘Probably working girls,’ says Max.

  ‘What sort of working girls?’

  ‘Girls in the rag trade, it’s their midday break, an apple instead of lunch, helps them keep their figures, a spot of exercise here before they go back to their Saint-Sulpice workshops, I wrote a piece about them a couple of months back, the girls working for Mavillon were on strike, furs, big patriotic firm, their employers say they are the elves of the fashion business, eighteen francs a day for ten hours’ work and a canny technique for keeping them up to the mark: they give them all the same job to do at the same time, the last three to finish get the sack and the time taken by the first becomes the standard for the job.’

  ‘Did you publish that?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, it’s Bolshevik stuff, I just told one of the girls to write a few lines for L'Humanité. But let’s get on, Hans, thirty villagers are gathered outside Hélène’s house, the factory-owner’s daughter has spread the word that this stranger is a witch who casts spells, people believe her, the same people who get work from her father.’

  ‘They are factory workers?’

  ‘Locals who work on the land, during the winter in Haute-Savoie they make moving parts for watches and turn out screws for the industries in the valley, it represents half their income.’

  ‘Will you let me describe the machines, the way they work? the screw-making will have my special screw-tiny.’

  ‘What has made the daughter so furious is that she’s been told that Thomas doesn’t actually sleep with the nurse, rumour has it that “he respects her”.’

  ‘Whereas he didn’t waste any time having his wicked way with your young, Protestant factory-owner’s daughter, as though she were a farm-girl.’

  ‘She didn’t put up much of a fight, and Thomas wasn’t the first. She wouldn’t have minded if he’d actually slept with another girl, she’d have got herself another boy, but it was the “respect” that stuck in her craw.’

  ‘And elsewhere.’

  ‘Max, you’ve got a dirty mind.’

  ‘So did Thomas go to bed with Hélène in the end?’

  ‘It was she who decided that’s how things had to be. He was perfect, behaved like a beaten dog. He atoned for the faults of the other man, back in Switzerland, the married man, the one she walked out on so dramatically.’

  ‘And probably an abortion, with uterine scrape. Have a care, Max! this is turning into
melodrama.’

  ‘You want to describe the uterine scrape?’

  ‘Absolutely not! What’s next?’

  ‘Eventually she is melted by Thomas’s impeccable manner.’

  ‘Will you let me do the crucial scene, Max? I never dared write one.’

  ‘I’ve already written it.’

  ‘In that case you can let me have Thomas’s chalet, I’ve always wanted to do a large chalet, such a play of stresses in the timber frame of a chalet.’

  ‘Thomas’s isn’t all that big, people in those parts don’t like big chalets, too hard to heat.’

  ‘Mustn’t worry about that,’ says Hans, ‘a large chalet built of dark wood, which creaks in the wind, just as you enter the village, a large family chalet, in fact two families of schoolteachers could live in it but your schoolteacher lives there by himself, you go in by a small door, under a rather fine lintel, with a date carved on it a full century ago, a corridor, a coat stand, door on the left, the main living room, it opens into two others, you return to the corridor, on the right are a kitchen and three other rooms, at the far end there are stairs, not a staircase actually, steps without a banister, you have to hang on to the risers, you reach a sort of mezzanine, then more steps, no a ladder, long and warped, when you get to the top a huge cross beam blocks your way across the whole width of the loft, thirty centimetres from the floor, you have to climb over it, there are two others exactly like it in the middle and at the far end of the loft, they’re called tie-beams, in the middle of these beams is a vertical beam, like a thick mast, the whole attic looks like a three-masted ship without the sails, another beam is aligned along the top of the three masts, it marks the apex of the roof, the ridge, a huge loft, it’s very solid, more than solid, it’s intelligent, the weight of the roof ridge, the weight of the roof, all that weight flows down through the three masts,’ Hans holds his clenched hands out in front of him, makes a movement which sweeps downwards along imaginary poles, ‘a force which sweeps down the entire length of the masts, along the tie-beams, it pushes down, trying to bend them, to snap them in the middle, but simultaneously it is opposed by the collective resistance of the tie-beams which strain with every fibre, and there is yet another pressure which arcs diagonally from the ridge and follows the sloping sides of the roof, then along the rafters, forces which run slantwise down the sides of a triangle, placing huge strains on its base at both ends and pushing them outwards,’ Hans’s hands have flowed slantwise down the side of the triangle, ‘the three crossbeams are as taut as hawsers, and the forces cancel each other, the forces which drop vertically along the masts are cancelled out by the resistance of each of the tie-beams and the forces which flow slantwise down the sloping roof and bear down on each end,’ Hans holds his hands apart horizontally, ‘the weight becomes weightless, interplay of forces, the three stout masts are technically speaking crown-posts, or king-posts, Max, let me tell it, the details will be forgotten, what will stay in the mind will be cement, tie-beams, rafters, crown-posts, a ship, a set of beams, of interlocking forces, when the wind blows it creaks like a glorious sailing ship, I’d love to live in a place like that, I’d turn it into a library, make it my study.’

  ‘Mainly you’d be cold,’ says Max.

  Hans and Max are again walking past Bacchus and his nymphs, a large bronze, the god, pot-belly to the fore, riding his donkey, lithe Maenads writhing around Bacchus, one has fallen flat on her back, arms and legs pointing in all directions, Hans stops:

  ‘It’s not as vivid as Flaubert.’

  ‘True, but they’re highly sexed, he’s rather a fright but they’re trying to do all sorts to him.’

  They move off, walk down the steps leading to the middle of the gardens, take a turn around the boating pond, a little boy is crying, his boat has got trapped in the middle of the pond, at the base of the fountain, where the wind does not reach, where the falling water creates a gentle vortex, where sails droop; the boat cannot escape, its fate is certain, it’s doomed, the little boy’s mother tells him, serves him right, what he deserves, else they’ll come and pinch it off of him, so stop that row, you’re a big boy now, the mother gives the boy a slap on the hand.

  Two weeks ago all the boats on the lake were stolen, for a laugh, vandals broke into the shed in the central avenue, the whole flotilla was found a week later, nonetheless, a boat can vanish, especially a sailing boat, the boy who’s crying knows a legend about a boat that vanished, it’s what is about to happen to his boat now, it will disappear beneath the central fountain, answering the call of all the sailing boats which have already disappeared down all the years, it will go to join them on the great ocean, an armada of sailing boats on the mighty main, the boy will command his boat, next in line to the admiral’s ship, huge waves, captains courageous, he looks up towards the façade of the Senate.

  Waves as high as buildings, the ships do battle with the storm, the last battle, but the man who owns the sailing boats and his assistant come with a thin rope which they hold across the pond, they loop the rope over the mast of the foundering sailing boat, haul it into more navigable waters, the wind blowing over the surface of the small pond can now swell the sails, the sun laughs in the playing fountain, the child has to go, no, you can’t have another turn, you do it on purpose, you do it every time I’m nice, never content, you always manage to blame me and cry, you were told one turn, a turn is a quarter of an hour, not longer, you agreed, and now you’re crying, you’re a naughty boy, every time I let you have your way you take advantage and ask for something else and start crying, if you don’t stop you’ll never get anything ever again!

  Hans would have liked Max to let him tell at least part of the love scene between Thomas and Hélène, he’s cross with Max for having beaten him to it:

  ‘A scene on the steamy side, Max, you’ve taken the best bit! I long to write something like that.’

  ‘It won’t be published.’

  ‘But you’ll let me read the scene you’ve written?’

  ‘No,’ says Max, ‘I had the nerve to put it down on paper but I wouldn’t dare let anyone read it, I’m afraid of what they would say.’

  ‘If you wrote it, it means that you did meet a woman.’

  ‘You know how it works, the only assignation you have is with your reader.’

  And Max explains to Hans that he finds it hard to face the public, to abandon the public he imagines while he’s writing and face the real public, he has a very complicated notion of the public, obviously he has a number of imaginary allies who accompany his every sentence, but always looming before him, on his right, is someone who keeps an eye on him and never approves of anything he writes, and someone sitting in front of him, who cannot read the sentence Max is writing but seems to know it even as it is being written, it seems as if it is being written in the head of this person at the same time as it is being written on Max’s page and the sentence brings a smile to the face of this faceless person, a smile which is unbearably knowing, it isn’t a friendly reader who might say I can hear too many iambic pentameters in that clause, too much blank verse, too many things that are self-evident, do you really want to say that the milkman came at ten past five? No, the person who sits opposite Max and smiles is a person who is ready to deride everything Max thinks particularly fine in his writing.

  Not a person as kindly disposed as the Hans who warned him he was perilously close to melodrama, not someone meticulous like his boss François Mérien, who told him this sentence lacks rhythm, take out a verb here, put a full stop there, no, someone who doesn’t need Max’s book but in Max’s mind is nevertheless a person of some importance, a person who smiles when he says:

  ‘Does this serve a useful purpose?’

  Max hasn’t called this faceless face names as he most assuredly would if he were dealing with some stupid critic, the blank face is that of both the public he needs to win over and the public which will never be won over, the public which Max masters for all its peevish ill-temper and its ideas abo
ut what a proper novel should be, the public which is there every time Max removes or amends a word and whispers in his ear:

  ‘Surely you don’t think you can get away with just doing that?’

  The loathsome, indispensable public with its insane and insatiable demand for nebulous quality, everything that makes Max feel furious with himself for not responding to the madness that is his, and angry also with this public which asks so much of him, he has finally grown to resent everyone who constitutes the real public, people like him, his contemporaries, everyone, every phrase becomes a cage and he resents all the people he invites to watch him in his cage, he feels he’d like to stuff their heads down a lavatory pan.

  He begins to hate people who never did anything to him, simply because he himself admits he’s no good at anything, and sometimes Max turns pragmatic, holds forth, what comes closest to it in tone is the small, shrill voice of the modish journalist, a touch limp-wristed, a touch corrupt.

  Max knows that limp-wristed and corrupt are idiotic words, but he needs them to give a name to the hate which seizes him, to give a name to what will be his failure, he has laid his book before that faceless face, saying here you are, know me, I who have done everything to ensure that you will recognise yourself in me, a struggle for recognition, he will lose, limp-wristed, corrupt, a name for the someone who would make fun of his love scene, of the fornucopia, as Flaubert might say, which Max wrote at a time when it could still cost an author dear, when at the very least it would get your book banned in public and limit you to the market for erotic books aimed at lawyers.

  And Max is all the more wary because not long ago, in Paris, a writer was found guilty of uttering an obscenity, Victor Margueritte, fined, stripped of his Legion of Honour for having written in La Garçonne, ‘she was picking the dark-hued lavender, seeing her crouching loins he had seized his chance, he had pulled up her skirt and she had felt the fiery god possess her.’