Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  ‘Nein, that would be bluffing!’

  ‘Whether I describe or don’t describe, the main thing is that it changed our militant heroine permanently, with lifelong after-care, the ne plus ultra, at the army’s expense.’

  ‘And for years your Thomas de Vèze has been taking Hélène out for walks of an afternoon, whenever it’s fine, a great love, is she able to speak?’

  ‘Very slowly, all she can say are the usual hellos and thank-yous, the neighbours call her the Madwoman, especially those who had almost believed what she’d said, the ones the gendarmes questioned at the time and did not prosecute, no charges were brought, there were only statements from witnesses, it was put down to a minor outbreak of hysteria foreign in origin, they concluded that the stock was healthy, it didn’t stop Hélène having a kid.’

  ‘And will The Madwoman be the title of this novella?’

  ‘Of my novel, Monsieur Kappler!’

  ‘You’re going to have to pad it out if you want to make it look like a novel, so you’ll need to stir in some factual stuff.’

  ‘You said there was a knack to writing descriptions?’

  ‘Yes, a secret, and a secret it will stay.’

  ‘I’ll swap you, the secret for a beautiful object I’ve spotted hereabouts.’

  ‘No object is worth a trade secret, Max.’

  ‘This one is.’

  ‘At least tell me what it’s called.’

  ‘It’s a spanking chair.’

  ‘Trust you French, such dirty minds! What’s it like? Did you find it in some knocking shop? How is the victim strapped in?’

  ‘Your trade secret first.’

  ‘No, Max, your secret, then I promise I’ll hand over mine.’

  ‘In fact, there’s nothing so special about it to qualify as secret, no mechanism to immobilise the partially unclothed victim, no hatch, it’s a perfectly inoffensive chair, looks like any other carver’s chair, with arm-rests, except that one of the arm-rests has been removed so that it doesn’t impede the pedagogue who is free to swish whoever he has forced on to his or her knees, every school in France has one, the one I saw was actually designed for a left-handed swisher.’

  *

  Hans refuses to include this hogwash in the backdrop to the novel, Max tries to negotiate, it would be fun, push the reader into a spot of dirty-minded adult fantasising, when he comes round he finds there are small children within reach and it’s his fault… As you wish… Over to you now: the secret of describing.

  ‘It’s not much of a secret either, Max, it’s simple, for a description you need a clash, a conflict, the conflict is much more important than the details otherwise the reader gets bored, the wind and the trees, if you show the wind bending the trees, you’ve soon finished, but if the trees resist you have a struggle, a lull, battle rejoined, suspense, drama, a structure, La Fontaine knew all this long ago, you can also do it along lines very fashionable nowadays, abandon descriptions altogether, take out plot, dialogue, things, you stand the character in front of a mirror or insert him into a waking dream, he talks to himself, you fracture grammar and thought, you make things easier for yourself, with short sentences, very curt.’

  ‘I prefer conflict,’ says Max.

  ‘In that case your sentence must brawl with itself, that is the whole point of describing, it’s not to be lifelike, nowadays photos are far better at doing that, you have to describe without knowing where you’re going, Max you see that light through the foliage? On the other side of the track? The flowers? I tell myself that if I succeed in getting them down interestingly on the page, not to remind the reader of what he has already seen and heard, but to make him hear what is unwonted in language, there, look, between the railway posters, the leaves and the purple dress that woman is wearing, there on the platform opposite, that couple, don’t stare, the dark-haired woman in the purple dress, the background ochre of the poster behind the purple dress and the belladonna shade of the scarf, I don’t know yet, there you have all the power of daylight, or there’s nothing, but if words start brawling with one another over the poster and the face of the woman in the purple dress, then my German language will become less useful for giving orders with, you’ve seen that face, Max? We’ve been through catastrophic times, but pretty women are always with us.’

  Max doesn’t think there’s anything particularly extraordinary about the woman, but now that Hans has stopped talking about Lena he feels disposed to admire all the women travelling on Swiss railways who come within his friend’s ambit.

  ‘A sentence brawling with itself. Today the fashion is the exact opposite, the curt sentence, Max, it’s perfectly good, no affectation, it packs a punch, it has a youthful ring, but actually it’s exactly like giving an order, there’s nothing ambiguous about it, it leaves nothing unsaid, the curt sentence is omniscience in a dozen words, it intimidates, it connives with order, the sentence must fight against order, Max, it must stretch its limbs and fight against everything it has been made to do up to now, we must invent a longer sentence, different from what it was before we began, a sentence that is without order, chiaroskewered words, the feeling that they’ve missed something out, don’t start a sentence if you know how to end it, because the reader will also know, and when you reread it you will rage at what you have not succeeded in doing, and if the whole thing suddenly starts to sing, even if it’s only in the proper name of plants for example, in the setting sun, Nerine, Torch Lily, Chinese Lantern, some day I’d like to write a poem with Chinese Lantern.

  ‘You’ve got to let it sing and when it starts to sing you must say to yourself the song is merely the conceit of what you have failed to achieve, you wanted to flay bare and you describe, you sough, you rage, and you start again, if necessary you jettison flowers, you start again with fungi, the underwoods, the colours which change, something to do with the name of fungi, Max, or the movements of a dancer or a woman singing.’

  Hans has managed to say a woman singing without stumbling, he would like to embrace Max and send him away saying kiss her for me, he says nothing, looking across at the woman on the platform he resumes:

  ‘You have to hurl words, otherwise all that remains will be curt sentences and telegramese.’

  ‘Hans, this couple of mine, Thomas and Hélène, eventually they had a kid, I don’t know what to do with kids in stories.’

  Chapter 11

  1969

  A Funeral and an Ambush

  In which a great writer is buried and no stone is left unturned to capture a spy who is present among the mourners.

  In which Henri de Vèze reads aloud a passage from Le Grand Meaulnes.

  In which we learn what transpired long ago at Waltenberg between a boar and a young woman.

  In which Lilstein warns you against the fine sentiments which can be so prejudicial to good moles.

  Grindisheim, October 1969

  One day the self stops spinning its own tales.

  What sort of people ever get over it?

  Charles Juliet

  Someone has taken Max by the elbow, Max said nothing to begin with; they walked on together for a moment without speaking, in the main body of the funeral cortege. Sometimes, at a bend, they could see shiny reflections of the brass band, the black plumes of the horses. ‘You’re late, young Lilstein, where were you?’

  ‘Forty years ago your face was exactly as it is now, Max, you haven’t changed a bit.’

  ‘The face of a man who’d seen it all, young Lilstein, and you had the face of an angel, an opinionated boy and as beautiful as the angel who says no, you stand very straight, cheeks smooth, still very presentable in your fifties, and you take me by the elbow as Hans used to when we went for walks, I don’t mention it to make you let go of me, today I need the familiar gesture, is the friendly arm a new custom in the GDR?’

  ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever done it, I saw Monsieur Kappler do it when you used to walk together.’

  ‘He did it for my sake, to be more French than t
he French, I rather liked it, you still call him Monsieur Kappler?’

  ‘I admired you, at Waltenberg I didn’t agree with either of you but I admired you, you knew so many things, a whole culture…’

  ‘… which had been through Hell, four years of Hell, you saw Hans again, after his final return to Rosmar in ’56?’

  ‘Two or three times.’

  ‘That all? Doubtless what you call “negative talks”?’

  ‘He fulminated, Max.’

  ‘Like you when you were sixteen, young Lilstein. And eighteen months later you helped him return to the West?’

  ‘I told whoever it might have concerned that we shouldn’t try to stop him.’

  ‘And whoever it did concern muttered into his little goatee, wiped his little glasses, and said in that famous reedy voice so sei es, let it be so. What sort of angel are you, young Lilstein, that whoever it concerned should, in your presence, start talking like God the Father in the land of atheists?’

  ‘When Monsieur Kappler said he’d like to come back to us, the general secretary of the Politburo himself gave the green light, I said it was a mistake, that it wouldn’t be long before he was off again, and when he did want to go…’

  ‘You performed your self-criticism, comrade, as if the green light had been given by you personally.’

  ‘Max, how well you know us.’

  ‘It’s age, young man, as you know, I’ve seen it all. You took the blame for the Politburo secretariat’s mistake, I mean the mistake made by whoever it might have concerned, and then, as your reward, whoever it did concern allowed Hans to leave.’

  ‘We couldn’t have done otherwise.’

  ‘And in any case whoever it did or his little comrades would have made you carry the can, which you would have found more painful than a session of self-criticism.’

  Early that morning, at seven o’clock, in a large house in the centre of Grindisheim, the Director of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution had reminded them of the orders: during the funeral itself they were only to keep the subject under surveillance, surround him, but in no circumstances approach him, it was not yet known if these would be the final instructions, that decision would be taken at the top, in Bonn, in the Chancellery, we have thirty agents on the ground, I don’t want a shambles, Colonel Sebald will be coordinating all services, orders can come only from him and he will get his orders from me alone.

  Around Max and Lilstein, the crowd walks slowly behind the antique hearse and the trade union brass band, banners, tubas, drums, and clarinettes. The band started with funeral marches, Chopin and Verdi, but as they proceeded the music became less gloomy, faces lifted. The procession was strung out along the tarmac road which rose in broad loops through the vine slopes of Grindisheim.

  ‘What sort of wine do they make in these parts, Max?’

  ‘Don’t you know? A German who doesn’t recognise wine on the vine bang in the middle of the Rhineland only a few days before they start the grape harvest?’

  ‘If it’s in a glass I can manage, but otherwise I’m a bit of a dunce.’

  ‘The leaves, my boy, the leaves: fleshy, ridged, veins like the veins on the back of the hand, pubescent, fruit very round, brown and russet blemishes, thick skin.’

  ‘Max, you learned that by heart.’

  ‘Just what you need! And the soil, young Lilstein, want me to recite that too?’

  Max’s forefinger aimed at the sky, his eye on the head of the procession:

  ‘Listen to that, unusual, eh?’

  The band is playing ‘Lilli Marlene’, very slow tempo.

  Hans had written: ‘Since it is out of the question for me to make my final journey along the sea front of my native town, I wish my funeral to be held at Grindisheim, in the vineyard between the Rhine and the forest, I ask for a band, flowers, wreaths, sunshine and would like people to drink.’ The council chose the route, from the town hall to the cemetery, taking a wide detour through the terraces of the vine slopes with a few deviations into the forest higher up.

  ‘A sandy soil,’ says Lilstein.

  ‘A good point, and that gives?’

  A wine tending to the sweet, as the guidebooks say, Max.’

  ‘Two good points. And if you give a certain clever little fungus its head?’

  ‘I’m not illiterate either, but that said, I prefer a wine that’s more sinewy.’

  ‘In that case we’ll have to go higher up. Hans would have approved of my feeding you little titbits about life and wine, like in the good old days. The ground just before you get to the forest, not so much loess and more slate, more wind, more cold, less mist, more sun, and more risk as well, but a definite flintiness in the back of the throat, just enough bitterness to make you want to drink more, you know, like life!’

  Max and Lilstein are halfway up the slope, Lilstein looks down, then up towards the top: the crowd is now strung out over nearly a kilometre. The terraces are retained by walls of pink sandstone, large blocks mellowed by the late-afternoon sun. At some bends in the road there are fountains; Max has seen one date, 1853. With a gesture of his hand, he points to the cortege:

  ‘You know the old saying, young Lilstein, “One eye to weep, the other to measure the length of the cortege”?’

  ‘And the name of the grape, Max?’

  ‘Noblesse, poor yield, virile on the tongue, young Lilstein, one of my great memories is of a bottle I drank in 1922 at Weimar with Rathenau; he asked me to communicate to the French that by threatening to occupy the Ruhr we were handing Germany over to the extreme right, Riesling, young Lilstein, the best! Hans would never have agreed to his coffin being paraded past second-rate vines!’

  As far as the Director of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution was concerned, if someone in the cortege showed hostility of any sort towards the suspect, that person would have to be discreetly neutralised:

  ‘We must be the only ones able to create problems for the suspect.

  He will doubtless exchange greetings with a number of people, do not become distracted by trying to identify them, that’s the job of another team; if a well-known member of parliament shakes his hand, don’t start thinking that the member of parliament in question is a traitor, our man has known many people for a very long time, and the traitor is perhaps somebody who pretends not to know him or knows that we know that they know each other and so goes out of his way to say hello to him, or even someone who knows that he is innocent and will say hello because he knows that our suspicions will fall first on those who keep their distance, and if you think we’re going to have problems working all this out, then you’ve understood where our target’s strength lies.’

  In the cortege, around Max and Lilstein are many people of their age, over fifty.

  There are also some who are younger, often in twos. Readers? Max draws Lilstein’s attention to a woman, mourning suit, fair hair, fleshy, black toque, pearl-grey scarf, dark leather boots, she is alone and she is beautiful.

  ‘From some points of view, Hans would have really loved this cortege, do you fancy her, young man?’

  ‘She’s probably a representative of the association of thirty-year-old women who read novels. Max, she has no husband, reading is an exclusive occupation.’

  ‘Ah, sociology, but tell me, for you to have been allowed out of the GDR to come here, you must be a person of some standing?’

  ‘Or of no account whatsoever, Max, I never asked them for anything, they never asked me for anything.’

  ‘And at the frontier were the Vopos on strike?’

  ‘I came via Vienna and Switzerland, I don’t give a damn now, since he died I’ve been like you, sleepwalking.’

  ‘And your eyes are red-rimmed, young Lilstein.’

  ‘Two deaths in six months, Max, it’s hard, but at least I’ve been able to be here for this funeral.’

  ‘Yes, and Lena’s would have cost you dearer than the price of a wreath. If I’ve the strength I’ll tell you a
ll, and also if you tell me a couple of things in confidence.’

  *

  Lilstein told you:

  ‘You know, young gentleman of France, in 1956 I’d arranged to meet Kappler, here, at Waltenberg, not in the Waldhaus, the Waldhaus was for you, the Kappler meeting was in the Konditorei, that same morning.’

  You look at Lilstein, he takes his time to sit down, he casts an eye all round the large hotel lobby. Some distance away, a table is occupied by a group of about fifteen people. The men are dressed in cycling gear. They are very noisy.

  ‘They drive up here in Mercedes,’ says Lilstein, ‘with their bikes on the roof. They have a good meal and then they ride sedately down again. Their wives are left with the job of driving the cars back.’

  He looks suddenly serious:

  ‘Authentic German athletes.’

  He sits down, gives you an affectionate look:

  ‘You’ll see, when you’re at Grindisheim, a funeral is not an easy thing, all your failures come charging back to you at the double. In ’56, Kappler and I had known each other for more than a quarter of a century, since my first visit to Waltenberg in ’29. He knew a great many things about life, he smiled, he treated me like an equal, I was almost sixteen, he called me young Lilstein, and every time I call you young man, or young Frenchman, I recall Kappler’s voice.

  ‘In ’56, I tried to persuade him not to return to the Democratic Republic, I did not succeed, he returned, set up house at Rosmar, by the sea, he held out for a few years and then left again. He’d already tried it once late in ’46, it hadn’t worked. He didn’t know where to settle, he went backwards and forwards between East and West.’

  He breaks off, gets up to greet the hôtelière who is heading for your table. You stand too. She has changed very little. She has put on weight but her face is unlined. Lilstein orders two glasses of white wine and two portions of Linzer, without even asking you. You sit down again, he resumes: