Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  Max fights against these genuine dreams, he takes back the initiative, questions his suspect with glee, brings her to the edge of a confession, then the friend returns, turns nasty, the violets disappear, his old teacher takes off her overall, the motor races wildly and Max swings into a copper-bottomed sleep.

  At least that’s the theory, but in this train which will take more than another three hours to deposit him below Waltenberg, Max senses that his little subterfuge isn’t working, he is much too wide awake now, all the problems of his waking hours will start up, he’s thirsty, he knows that if he gets out of his couchette and puts the light on to pour himself a glass of water he will start something irreversible, he won’t be able to go back to bed.

  Sleep? what’s the point? sleep, silence: death’s antechambers. Not feeling too cheery this morning, he gets up, drinks the glass of water, he feels another need, he opens the small cupboard, shuts it again, without using the chamber pot, he doesn’t like them, even the ones provided by the Compagnie internationale des wagons-lits et des grands express européens, with gold border and blue monogram, he smiles, Mérien’s neat observation:

  ‘I want a journalist to be as curious as a piss-pot.’

  He pulls his coat over his pyjamas and puts on his slippers, as a young man he loathed the slippers his mother bought him, he preferred leather mules, even in winter.

  One night, in the trenches, a comrade had said:

  ‘When it’s all over I’m going to buy myself some slippers, and I’ll kill the first bastard who laughs.’

  Max steps out of his compartment and walks all the way to the toilet at the far end of the coach.

  When he gets back, he is no longer sleepy nor does he want to be sleepy, he just feels stiff and sluggish, with a migraine in the offing, he opens one of the windows in the corridor, holds his face into the icy air, reaches out with one hand to snatch snow from the walls that are so close and rub it over his eyes and cheeks, not such a good idea, the roughness under the crystals, no more hand or even no more arm, it only takes a moment, like that time at Veneux, at the start of 1918, a series of appalling howls and hissings, the trench is about to collapse, they’d looked at each other: a whizzing shell bursts, just metres away! they were all there, Stéphane with his mouth hanging open, eyes like chapel hatpegs, short of one hand, he wasn’t screaming yet as he would in the seconds that followed, Max remembers that at that moment he’d thought:

  ‘So that’s what’s meant by looking surprised.’

  Then the screams, which gangrene had turned into moans a few days later in the battalion infirmary, Stéphane whom they comfort through the smell of disinfectant and rot:

  ‘Thought we’d come and cheer you up, take you out of your shell.’

  And the medic who sees no point in further amputations:

  ‘The gangrene has spread everywhere.’

  Max closes the window, he looks down the length of the corridor of his sleeping-car, the designs on the lampshades overhead, he runs his hand over the grained lemonwood veneer, the discreet brass handrail, and proceeds slowly, so that he feels the thickness of the pile of the carpet under his feet, everything is so very orderly, luxurious, calm, he enters his compartment, gives up all thought of his couchette, sits on the seat opposite, somewhat put out that he’s not facing the engine, but if you’re that pernickety then you’re going to find growing old something of a strain.

  Stéphane’s father was Mérien, François Mérien, owner of Le Soir, more than a million copies sold daily. Six months ago, in September, he’d said to Max:

  ‘I’m sending you to cover these shenanigans because I want the real behind-the-scenes story, what they’re saying about Europe, their thinking, their politics, all their discussions, what’s behind it all, cash? Power? Treason? A conspiracy? They’ll talk about values, that’s good, I like values, I want every man jack of them stripped bare! You’ll be staying with them at the Waldhaus, all expenses paid, keep the bar bill down, off you go, and make the most of it.’

  That was the boss for you, short-fuse, but he was very fond of Max, Max had written to him immediately with an account of Stéphane’s death, without frills, death of a hero, Mérien had been grateful to Max, he’d never tried to check what was hidden behind what he had written and, as the years passed, he, who was obsessed with clarity, assuaged his fatherly grief with the myth of a bullet in the head on the field of honour that he would never have entertained for one moment if it had been someone else.

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’ Mérien had asked Max at the very start of their relationship, when he took Max to lunch so he could hear him talk about his son.

  It was just after what had been called the Victory. Max had not answered, he was drifting; before the war, he’d wanted to be a writer, he’d given that idea up. One day, Mérien had pressed him and the only thing Max could think of to say was:

  ‘I’d like to be a Nosy Parker.’

  Mérien had given him a job and turned him into a reporter:

  ‘From this day henceforth, subject, verb, object. For adjectives, see me first!’

  He’d also ordered him not to write any sentence more than fifteen words long, then he’d loosened the reins. Max had become one of his best reporters.

  As the years passed, Max had come to like François Mérien very much. His boss had a reputation for being a coarse man, but Max knew that he set aside one hour every day to translate Pindar or Tacitus, he had known Mallarmé, Jules Renard, Gabriel Fauré, and at least once a day he would go into the editorial room and shout:

  ‘Make Wendy feel weepy and Andy feel randy! And let’s do it with style!’

  He had interests in a company that made a vitamin-enriched cordial, he handed out bottles of the stuff to politicians terrorised by his paper and its two and a half million readership, an ambiguous gift, some ministers tried to find out through Max whether the cordial was a friendly gesture or if it meant Mérien considered that they were finished.

  Even Poincaré had been scared the day Max asked him for his opinion of the cordial:

  ‘Tell your employer that I partake regularly. And that I never felt better in my life.’

  Another minister had offered to make the cordial part of the weekly rations given to colonial troops, Mérien had refused and laughingly told Max:

  ‘That would be like something out of Feydeau. It’s best if all this stays between him and me.’

  And Max never did discover if Mérien seriously believed in the effectiveness of his cordial.

  In the train, too late now to go back to sleep, too early for breakfast, Max tries to think, morning is his best time for ideas, before midday you can still put one thought with another and shake them up with a stub of pencil and a notebook, a number 2 lead pencil, not too bold but soft enough to keep up with your thoughts, a 2B. After lunch, all Max is good for is living.

  He shuts his eyes, opens them again, it’s daylight, the frost has gone from the window, slopes now figure much more prominently in the landscape, Max muses, remembers, lets his mind wander, abandons his memories, stops tapping a pointless rhythm with his pencil, these European conferences, find a subject for a real think-piece, with more punch than usual, make it dramatic, deep down it’s all theatre, difficult, when they’re on stage the characters refuse to play down their personalities, or rather Max himself finds it difficult to keep his distance, you feel much too much at home with these people, money, power, you were a pawn in the game, not insignificant but a pawn nonetheless, surplus to requirements.

  Max never completed his studies after the war was over, a writerly vocation, I’d have been better off becoming a respectable solicitor, with wife, in some market-town, then I wouldn’t be hearing someone like Wendel saying you know, a job like mine, pure fluke, and if I stay it’s because I don’t really have a choice, no one else would do it.

  All these people want to spend time with Max, they need him, he is the intermediary between them and the hoi polloi they all want to n
obble, organise, direct, control, and above all be loved by.

  ‘Single-minded about collective action’: a phrase that goes into the notebook, Max is not entirely happy with it, come back to it later, big people convinced they are right to bully the little people they rule and become even more authoritarian and inflexible, make this clearer, find an image, a parable, newspaper readers like a parable, a story:

  ‘Max! find me a story!’ Mérien would say sometimes when one of his pieces seemed too abstract.

  A life spent as a famous reporter, you drink champagne with Van Ryssel who owns a fifth of all the steelworks in Europe, you lunch as the guest of Duissard whose bank holds a large percentage of Van Ryssel’s shares, and you even bought a hat with Merken, at Freiburg, as if you could care less, Merken put one hand on your shoulder saying good choice I’ll get one too, Merkel copied you, a dark-grey bowler, we have the same tastes, true, but it’s not you who goes home, picks up a pen and writes What is Metaphysics? No, you go back to the paper to churn out copy and you never made anything of that meeting, you were taught for two years by Bergson and you never made anything of that either, at least Merken got a hat out of it, Max also likes Willi Münzenberg, one of the men Moscow never fails to send to congresses like this, and there’s also Hans who doubts everything and is the only really new writer to have emerged since the war, Max even recalls the beauty spot on the thigh of Madame de Valréas, their common muse, whose strength of will is the driving force behind these conferences, everyone here likes Max and wants to be liked by him.

  Throughout his entire youth, Max sought to win them over, I am becoming the finest writer of my generation, all doors are open to me, wonderful pages you put in the waste-paper basket without even rereading them, and it’s only when you can no longer be bothered to write any more pages wonderful or otherwise that people start swarming all over you asking for articles for newspapers, parties at the Valréases, highly enjoyable, until the day Mérien yelled at you:

  ‘No fancy literary stuff! An article is only something you’ve got time to read in the bog!’

  Max knows all that, he forgets, the dream of writing that will endure, he pulls himself together, keep at the daily task, he learns to forget just enough to allow him to cling to his dream, to make the most of it, like a good cigar or a liqueur, reread Maupassant, Turgenev fast enough for you to come away with the impression that you could do as well.

  Madame de Valréas! Universal muse to the fine assembled company, a Baroness, and there is no shortage of Baronesses in these circles, but she has a genuine ancestry, money, the talents which go with money, good legs, teeth extremely suitable for smiling with, has a certain je ne sais quoi, as they used to say before the war, Max has slept with her, just once, at the close of the Belle Époque, a fine house, the property of a banker, in Brittany, with a wheat field which sloped directly down to the beach, the gold of the sand, the green of the ears of corn dotted with bright red freckles, ribbons, parasols, and all of it whipped by squally showers and blustering winds combined with whatever the cloud-factory threw up at the sun, the gleam of molten metal, the flap of flags, the tumults of opium, sandstorms, blowing with a strength which lent an aura of bravery to the little dolls in their Sunday best who had come to the beach to kill their germs in the foaming brine and uttered coltish shrieks of terror each time a wave nibbled a crinoline hem or a shoe, in May 1914, the good times.

  By about two in the morning, all the couples had formed up, Max and Madame de Valréas had found themselves alone in the lounge, Max is not very susceptible to the charms of La Valréas, a state of affairs which allows him to risk a remark:

  ‘It looks, Baroness, as if we’ve been left to ourselves.’

  Was she really tight? Just drunk enough for you to be allowed to do whatever you wanted? She’d followed Max, glass in hand, and had made him go first as they went up the stairs, saying:

  ‘The best bit is always the stairs.’

  The Baroness is a virtuoso conversation-maker, when she speaks she backs her words with movements of her hands:

  ‘You know, I’m from the south of France.’

  Not quite. The way she speaks is altogether more calculated than loquacious, she makes a point of flexing the joints of each finger and puts you in mind of a crazed orchestra maestro, or a spider’s legs, her voice is metallic, her eyes violet, her body a touch on the skinny side, but buttocks which fear no man’s scrutiny, she is an expert, she knows that what she does with her hands takes in only the simpletons, and that it captivates men who are receptive to well-oiled gestures, she has a dream: to reconcile France and Germany and help build a Europe free of Russians and Yanks, from Danzig to Bordeaux and Athens.

  ‘Not forgetting Italy, where very interesting things are happening.’ A Europe with clout, with workers who turn up on time, who are paid fairly but not excessively, well-behaved adolescents, large families, full churches and respect for success.

  Max tries to sum up all that in one phrase, for a cross-title for the paper, he notes: ‘The Values of Wartime Togetherness Applied to Entire Continent’. He puts his pencil down, stares at his reflection in the window and murmurs to himself: ‘with La Valréas having the right to open her legs whenever she feels like.’

  In the corridor, a bell, a voice:

  ‘Breakfast! First Sitting!’

  Already. Max gets washed and dressed quickly.

  He is sitting at a table in the restaurant-car, he has half an hour before he arrives at Küblis, he makes a few more notes, the main points of what will happen, four or five people are already in the process of drawing up the Seminar’s end-of-conference resolution, this sort of conference only works if the organisers know in advance where they’re going, it’s only a talking-shop but it’s precisely on these occasions that they fine-tune ideas on which political campaigns and votes in parliaments will later turn, an old-fashioned free-for-all, Max had seen what had happened in London the previous year.

  Six days spent on a few odds and ends of phrases, ‘how we must give shape to the natural momentum of the European economy’, that was included at the behest of Van Ryssel and the steel cartel, ‘maintaining the status quo of frontiers inside Europe’, one for the Poles and the Czechs, ‘safeguarding the sovereignty of nations’, for the Germans this means withdrawing the French and Belgian occupying troops, and then other forms of words, rather more cryptic, ‘to give full scope to initiatives taken by industry’, trade unionists insisted on the addition of ‘with proper regard to social justice’, so it gets added, all under the beaming smiles of the bankers and the socialists, the carp, the rabbit and a sickly-sweet sauce.

  And behind all that, other arguments about words among philosophers or economists, even artists get stuck in, apparently at Waltenberg a great deal will turn on the question of values, value, what actually defines value? In economics, in morality, in art? The value of a loaf of bread, of a painting, an idea, a machine, an alliance, Max feels exhausted at the mere thought of having to write it all up, he ought never to have accepted the Globe assignment, should have just stuck to reporting it for Le Soir, Le Globe is a stylish weekly, glossy paper, fine photos, in-depth articles across two pages, prestige.

  For Le Soir, no problem, a piece of five hundred words maximum every day, the most common words in the language, make absolutely clear what’s at stake, ‘between the supporters of the United States of Europe and the defenders of old-style nationalism, who will run out winners?’ or possibly ‘tension at Waltenberg between theorists and pragmatists’, no, that would never get through, Max can hear Mérien’s voice, journalism, Wendy and Andy, imagine the look on Andy’s face if you plonked him down in front of Merken’s musings about ‘the spatiality of available intrasocietal being’, no point including anything about philosophy for Le Soir, or else find another angle, turn it into a fight, the boar, Merken is a definite boar, now what’s Regel like? Battle Royal between the Heron and the Boar, in François Mérien’s view this argument between philosophers
would turn out badly:

  ‘In private the Germans, at this juncture, aren’t doing themselves any favours.’

  With Le Globe it’s altogether different, almost too much space, in it Max has just read a remarkable article it has published, three full pages on the theory of relativity, a major paper by a young physicist, name of Tellheim, you can follow it as easily as a detective story, you can understand every word but it’s not over-simplified, Max has been told that Tellheim would be at the Waldhaus, the thought of sharing the hospitality of Le Globe with such a clever man paralyses Max, he should have stayed in Paris, covered sports events, the light-heavies, Battalina v. Genscher! And the Vel’ d’hiv!

  Chapter 10

  1929

  An Artichoke Heart

  In which we observe many philosophers, economists, politicians, artists, and even young Lilstein, as they meet in the Swiss Grisons to help make Truth manifest.

  In which Hans Kappler feels dizzy as he hears a Lied being sung in the Waldhaus Hotel.

  In which the Swiss Army suddenly looms.

  In which young Lilstein gets drunk on French cognac.

  In which Max Goffard spends his one and only wedding night.

  Waltenberg, March 1929

  Philosophy must constantly exercise within the heart of Europe’s humanity its function of straightening what is crooked.

  Ernst Cassirer

  The mountain, the Waldhaus, the peace to begin with, the clientele of skiers, and then on the Saturday morning within hours it all starts to buzz, Baroness Valréas in the vast lobby like Napoleon at Austerlitz, with her staff officers, secretaries, her executive director, her daughter Frédérique, and Erna, the debates secretary, she calls them her ‘brigade’, and Merken’s wife and the wife of Regel, Merken’s rival, the room booked for the philosophy seminar is too small, maybe, but it’s out of the question for the philosophers to be put in the room booked for the economists, and the large lounge-cum-library has been earmarked for the political sessions which will be chaired by Monsieur Briand; the private secretaries start to play dirty tricks on each other, the chamber-maids and valets of the principal guests meet up again, yes, last time was London, then again there’s the whole of the hotel’s staff, less sophisticated, who keep an eye on the valets from the city, to see how they do things but refuse to be taken in by their fine airs, they’re the same as us, they obey orders.