Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  ‘Not invariably, not invariably.’

  Smiles, Briand helps himself to the lion’s share of the salad, tastes it, raises his glass to his lips.

  More smiles, putting salad in a mouth with a 1911 Burgundy, the man’s a boor, no, Baroness, women are not invariably on the side of reconciliation, and I’m not thinking only in terms of dalliance, which always goes hand in hand with opulence, his right hand moves through space and designates the whole table, Hans thinks that Briand has rather short arms, my dear Baroness, in fact she is a republican Baroness, she couldn’t care less about her title, especially when it’s Briand who uses it on her, but all the same there’s etiquette, silver knives and forks, they bear the Valréas crest, all brought here by the Baroness’s staff so that everything shall be as it ought, Briand sinks back in his chair, the more he ages the more like a hunchback he sometimes looks, but he does not slump, he’s a frump, his nails are clean but Max saw him in the lift ploughing them with a visiting card, Briand is happy to believe that the barony is now just a crest on a set of forks and that the Baroness doesn’t care for the idea, the important thing is that the title should be retained in conversation.

  ‘Not invariably,’ Briand says again, ‘Max here is a demagogue, Max is always trying to please the ladies and casts them as reconcilers, but he’s wrong.’

  Briand has a fine voice, full, he uses it the way singers do, he places the sound of his voice in front of his face, with chiaroscuro effects, and as you listen you forget everything else, women are not always on the side of reconciliation, it’s not just a question of dalliance, I could, adds Briand, tell you stories about musical Maenads whose way with a suitor could hardly be described as dalliance, but we’ll let that lie, I’m thinking particularly about politics, always about politics, where women can be the real cause of disasters, smile from Briand at the Baroness who is wondering where President Briand is going with this, she knows that he is her friend, she also knows that he’ll do anything for a witty remark.

  Max has set Briand off, he wouldn’t like to be in the Baroness’s shoes, she needs Briand, she smiles back at Briand to show him that everyone’s listening, and in part of her smile there is also the idea that eating salad with Burgundy is something that’s simply not done, at least in the manuals written for young wives, but it’s all right if you’re someone like Briand, always assuming that you do it in the presence of someone like the Baroness who has seen it all before, the idea of getting Merken and Briand together over a cup of tea isn’t terribly attractive, Briand’s Anglophilia.

  ‘I’m quite serious,’ says Briand, ‘women and disaster, I’m speaking of the past, of History, Joan of Arc, for instance.’

  Silence, even Max says nothing, Madame de Valréas ventures with a thin, rather forced smile:

  ‘It’s a good few years since I’ve been anything like Joan of Arc.’

  But Briand, in his full-bottomed voice, launches forth, in tragic vein:

  ‘Joan should have stayed in her field counting her sheep and spinning their wool, instead of behaving like an amazon! There would have been excellent Plantagenet marriages, a Franco-English kingdom which would have been invincible and would have maintained the peace in Europe for many centuries, ah! the monstrous regiment of virgins!’

  Briand turns to Madame de Valréas pointing his fork at Max:

  ‘As for the salad, you should know that I’m not a barbarian, the dressing was made in the kitchen by my favourite gourmet, it’s a Goffard dressing, that’s how it shall be known from this day forth, Max perfected it last winter, a salad dressing designed to go with red wine: olive oil, hazel-nut oil, a home-made vinegar derived from a very good wine, sea salt, mild pepper, Strasbourg mustard with herbs, a sliver of Emmenthal, and an artichoke heart.’

  ‘A quarter of an artichoke heart,’ says Max.

  ‘All right, a quarter!’

  Briand holds up a lettuce leaf and a small piece of camembert on the end of his fork, and let us not forget the yolk of an egg, a thick but creamy dressing, brings out the flavour of the lettuce, he turns his fork round and round before his eyes, it discreetly enhances the cheese, with his left hand he raises his wineglass, and with the wine it is unassertive, an accompaniment, Max, once more I take my hat off to you!

  Behind Briand, at another table, a small one, in a corner, two men engrossed in their plates, they speak without even looking at each other, Maynes looks at them, says to Max: do you know them?

  ‘The tall one, yes,’ says Max, ‘he’s called Münzenberg, Willi to his friends, and they form a large constituency, he’s everywhere, Paris, Berlin, London, I’m surprised you don’t know him, he’s the sort of man who in forty-eight hours could find you a couple of thousand bodies and by no means of the humblest class to fill a cinema or a music-hall provided that it was in the anti-fascist cause or to defend Bolshevik Russia.’

  ‘A Moscow agent?’

  ‘It’s more elegant than that, he’s a volunteer, enrols in great causes, an artist, he is capable of creating a first-rate newspaper in forty-eight hours, or of financing a film, he doesn’t mince his words, says he doesn’t understand what’s going on right now among the Soviets, I don’t know the man with him.’

  Münzenberg glances up, looks across at Max and Maynes, Max gives him a little wave.

  The man sitting opposite Münzenberg says this Seminar bores me, Willi, you’re right comrade Vaïno, these capitalists and their guard dogs are boring, but there are two or three young people here who should be of interest to you, especially one of them, very committed, he wants a revolution, he’s very cultured, he’s older than he looks, in two, three years he’ll be absolutely ready, he’s more or less ready now, just a small Trotskyite tendency but I think that could easily be taken care of, I have every confidence in you, you’ll find a way of getting him to denounce two or three saboteurs, there’s also a girl, a philosopher, but I think she is less committed, she’s the daughter of Baroness de Valréas, our fascist Baroness, not a hundred per cent fascist nowadays, I’ve heard her say better the Reds than America, could be useful to us, the international movement is going to need people like that, the girl has a very logical mind, she lives under Merken’s roof, he’s the favourite philosopher of the ultra-conservatives, but she should be coming back to Paris one of these days, she doesn’t like the old world, take it from me, these young people have great futures, the young man is called Lilstein, anyway, I leave you to judge, you’ll be the one who decides, I mean the appropriate authorities.

  The man who answers to the first name of Vaïno is less than keen on this mention of the appropriate authorities but he says nothing to Münzenberg, Münzenberg is very good at getting things moving, he does much good work in the struggle against fascism, and Vaïno Vaatinen fully acknowledges his worth, he finds him a little casual at times, Münzenberg has told him that this is necessary for his work, but if Münzenberg is allowed to remain for too long so far from Moscow, in Paris or London, he’ll deteriorate, he should be called back more often, you realise we’re being watched? Yes, says Münzenberg, it’s the Frenchman, the journalist who’s sitting next to Maynes, steer clear of him, I nearly forgot, adds Münzenberg, there’s another very interesting young man, a physicist, a disciple of Nils Bohr, he was born in Prussia but lives in France, his mother is a dressmaker, his father is a mechanic, he’s young, has no ideology, but he has the right class reflexes, his name’s Tellheim, I saw him turn pale when Neuville explained the experiment with the two working-girls, when he was explaining his model of the scientific organisation of work, he has the gall to call it scientific, the young physicist could have strangled him.

  Neuville on his couch, the circle of admirers around him, elegant exposition delivered in a slow voice, the omniscience of the rich, two working-girls, seated side by side, in front of them two heaps of pens and two display cabinets, the young man is sickened by Neuville who talks about them as though they were guinea-pigs, they put the pens vertically in the slots in the cab
inet, one of them picks up a dozen pens in her left hand and inserts them one at a time with her right hand, when no pens remain in her left hand she takes another dozen and continues to insert them with her right hand and so forth, there are fifty slots in the cabinet, when she is two-thirds of the way through her task the other girl has already finished and is resting, hands on knees, she hasn’t worked any faster, but though following the same rhythm she has not inserted the pens in the same way, she also picked up her pens from the pile one by one, but using both hands together, her two hands doing the same thing at the same time, moving directly from the pile to the cabinet without an interval between, rationalise, you see she has time to rest, she previously worked in textiles, she made dresses by machine, the kind you work with your legs, with your feet on a treadle which rocks and engages the pulleys, which make the needle move, apparently this movement of the lower limbs gave the girls ideas, so bromide was added to their food in the canteen, nobody asked them.

  It was when Neuville smiled as he mentioned the bromide that the young physicist almost lost his temper, said Münzenberg, I whispered in his ear that anger makes you give the best speech you’ll ever regret, he allowed Neuville to drone on and on uninterrupted, he spoke enthusiastically of pen-sorting, without bromide, yes, the rhythm could be speeded up, not too fast to begin with, set a standard, with the same salary since they don’t get so tired, even more pens and fewer hands, or increased volume with the same staffing-level, or again greater volume at a higher rhythm, I propose, said Neuville, to call that an adjustment variable, as physicists do, Neuville smiles at Tellheim, we too are turning into scientists, the scientific organisation of work, there are around three million motor neurons for every thirty grams of human flesh, which makes two and a half billion motor neurons to enable the human machine to function, I have set myself the task of calculating the quantitative value of the work of these motor neurons if a workman does exactly what he’s told, how he should lift an object using five movements, how to carry, how to walk, how long each step should be as a function of his height, how to put the object down in five other movements, the rhythm by which he should return and repeat the operation, in terms of output it’s possible to move from twelve tons of steel a day to forty-seven, from twelve to forty-seven! that’s a gain of three hundred per cent, you install cameras to record movements, you attach lights to wrists, all the joints, you under-expose the negative and you get a film which is a finished time-and-motion schema, the system can be set up in three weeks, express fatigue in equations, learn how to calculate, I landed in the United States in 1906 with less than a dollar in my pocket at the same time as a million others. Today, I am one of the best-paid men in the world.

  Neuville also tells them about his expedition in the Canadian Great North, fifty-three cowboys paid four dollars a day, one hundred and thirty-three horses, of which one carried sixty-five kilos of ladies’ shoes, everything required for a full expedition into an area which still has no reliable maps, aluminium tables, the latest thing, crystal glasses, French saucepans, a hundred and eighty kilos of books including War and Peace, a few kilos of foie gras and, the last word in up-to-date equipment, five ultra-modern half-tracks, two broke down, beyond repair, I organised a photo session for the cameras, a trail down the side of a cliff, two of the half-tracks were pushed over the edge into the ravine, we sold the pictures for more money than the two vehicles had cost, it’s communication that matters nowadays, it’s through communication that capital and labour will be brought together, and it will be done using the Neuville index.

  *

  On the Tuesday, the third day of the Seminar, coffee time on the terrace, sunshine, flags flapping, good fun is had with a telescope chained to the safety rail, five centimes for three minutes, people gather nearby, around the panoramic table, they throw bits of bread or crumbs of fruit cake for a few jackdaws, huge Swiss hotel jackdaws, far off to the north-east rises the Gehenna Pass.

  ‘I can see a red dot,’ says Max.

  The eye that is drawn by the red dot also detects the movement of a white streamer, the trace of sinuous movement on the slope, something not quite as white as the snow.

  ‘It’s the army,’ explains Merken who has taken out his own binoculars and is also looking towards the Gehenna, ‘the Swiss army, white anoraks, mountain light infantry, white trousers, white skis, probably come from Davos.’

  Through the telescope Max eventually picks out an orderly, regular line, broken white against the dazzling white of the snow, with a serrefile officer in bright red, they are still a long way away, a waving streamer and a red dot, Max says gaily:

  ‘The young ladies will be delighted to learn that e’en now a pack of hearty young men is bearing down on us on skis, all in white, with a fine figure of an officer in red.’

  An entire squad, the squad’s careful winding progress, it’s easier for the officer, his twists and turns are more expansive, the euphoria of a long descent, nothing to impede, pure Telemark turns, Merken speaks to Moncel, he has put his binoculars away, no one dares ask to borrow them, at intervals Moncel nods a yes, a good relationship, the exhilaration of the descent, moving bodies which enfold space in sinuous motion, the virgin snow, space which excites, that’s why I like skiing, says Merken, clear a space for oneself, these words aren’t very accurate, you can’t clear a space for yourself, it’s more hair-raising, euphoric and hair-raising, you discover that space persists whatever we do, the moment there are no more goals, it opens up.

  Max remains glued to his telescope, the Swiss army which dresses its officers in red, you know, they’ll have to have it explained to them, our first months of the Great War, three hundred thousand-odd dead, our rich experience was to serve some useful purpose, another one of these types who want to die with their boots on from proper wounds, I can already hear the order to fire, aim for the red dot, one good skier less, I’ll never ski as well as that, he puts me in mind of my dragoon officers, Max goes on looking a while longer, also Bournazel, no one knows if he died dressed in red or grey, I’m certain he’d kept his red cloak on, to feed the myth; Max gives up his turn to Elisabeth Stirnweiss, Stirnweiss leaning forward with her eye to the telescope is also a sight to behold, one that doesn’t last.

  Stirnweiss offers to surrender her turn to Hans who declines politely, you’re very kind but it hurts my eyes, he turns away and goes back to talk to young Frédérique, Madame de Valréas’s daughter, he’s not thinking now of Schumann or the rest, he’s watching the darkhaired girl talk philosophy in the excitable voice of a sports reporter.

  Two days ago, Hans had a long conversation with Max, told him about his attempted trip on the Queen Mary between Le Havre and Southampton, a disaster, Max, I was sea-sick, I couldn’t think of anything else, especially not Lena, but it set me to rights again, I decided it was time I grew up, no more distractions, an end to fond imaginings, no more Renard-style diaries, yes, a great novel, on the decline of values, Max had reservations, it’ll be seven hundred pages of pure ideas, too bad said Hans, and anyway you can always put me right, at this point a girl with dark hair approached and laughed as she planted two kisses on Max’s cheeks, Max introduced Frédérique de Valréas to Hans, when I first saw her she was running up and down the stairs with no clothes on, Frédérique didn’t take offence, I was three, and the day it happens to you, Max, I’ll tell everyone about it too.

  Ever since that meeting Hans and Frédérique have had a half-dozen private conversations, I’m thirty-eight, she’s nineteen, Lena has disappeared, he will take the girl by the hand, they’ll walk in the forest together, and then she will take his hand.

  On the terrace, Frédérique says to Hans:

  ‘Are you listening, Monsieur Kappler? I’m talking to you but your mind is elsewhere, my mother warned me, authors are unbearable, you think you’re talking to someone and their mind is elsewhere, with which of your characters are you walking in this forest at this moment? A pretty woman?’

  Frédérique beh
aves like a woman who is cross, but she is delighted to have caught him out, Hans looks like a clumsy teddy bear.

  It’s Max’s turn again with the telescope, Hans and Frédérique move away from the group, Max searches for five centimes, then five more, the movements on the snow remind him of Bournazel, he was another one who slalomed down slopes, on a horse.

  Max again offers to pass his turn to Hans who declines, to Stirnweiss, but she has suddenly disappeared, he puts his eye once more to the telescope, Hans! Come and see, it’s a tall, handsome, blood-coloured officer, Hans is very busy at the other end of the terrace, Max calls Tellheim, Come here! resistance of the snow, angle of the slope, resistance of the air, elasticity coefficient of the human body, you can express all this wonderful zigzagging as a mathematical formula, you can tell us if time passes relatively faster for them than for us, Tellheim has the telescope, people are enjoying themselves, everything is relative, handsome officer, Tellheim wanders off.

  And then the punch-up started, not exactly what you’d expect to find behind the word, a brawl in a gutter, not as vulgar, but more a tasteful brand of competing, a form of rivalry that was nonetheless unremitting, a struggle to occupy the high ground, score points, have the last word, capture attention.

  It started below them, outside the entrance to the hotel, the arrival of the squad of mountain light infantry, when Mademoiselle Stirnweiss helped Lena Hellström take off her bright red anorak.