Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  ‘They’re NATO’s, defence of the free world, Hans, it’s worth it, Hans, for a spot of architectural jumble.’

  Max turns, gestures to the façade of the TNP, that’s theatre for you, Sir Novelist, if you want a full house you have to have mistaken identities and suchlike, you’ve got to have good box-office, otherwise no theatre, no Lorenzaccio, the people who cheered Pétain now come and applaud this rubbish about resisters, the people who cheered de Gaulle turn out to applaud the death of the tyrant, they’re often the same people, the resisters who had ideals applaud the denunciation of the new regime, the older women turn into duchesses, the girls die deliciously, everyone believes different things at the same time, that’s the togetherness of theatre.

  ‘This guide knows the region like the back of his hand,’ says Lena, ‘in summer it’s a reserve, he’s a gamekeeper, he takes care of chamois and moufflon, he knows every tree, every rock for twenty kilometres round about, he started with his father when he was six, once he brought me back down through fog.’

  Around noon, they reached their destination, another col. From here, they can see the wide valley of Davos, through their binoculars they can make out black dots moving down the slopes.

  And then the ski descent, after a five-hour trek, heading back towards Waltenberg, long diagonal traverses, a few breath-stopping slopes, there are two schools of thought, those who favour the Telemark turn – a full bend of the leading knee, followed by a dip of the trailing knee, the front ski starts pointing inward, engage turn, then straighten up slowly bringing skis together, not too hasty, skis exactly parallel – and those, like Lena and the guide, who take risks and execute the move called the christiania or christie stem turn, or even the classic christiania, madness, you turn by kicking one ski against the other, Lilstein tried it, he fell over.

  Lena didn’t laugh.

  ‘Michael, promise me you’ll stop fooling around and I’ll teach you how to do christianias tomorrow.’

  Now and then they pass through clumps of larch, sometimes it’s level going for a kilometre or more, they push themselves along with their sticks, the silence of the forest, they come out into full sunlight, then they can ski some more, Lena teaches Lilstein the secrets of the stem turn, he is euphoric, his headache has gone, she laughs at him with unexpected sweetness, the guide restrains members of the group who feel like trying short cuts, they climb back up to a small col, no, says the guide, not the Hirschkuh, you’d need to spend the night on the mountain, Lilstein dreams of spending the night on the mountain, Misha, you will behave yourself, won’t you? they are both in the Hirschkuh refuge, flames in the hearth, they are frozen, she has taken her clothes off, she has wrapped herself in several blankets, he’s lying next to her, no, there are two beds, each of them sleeps in a separate bed, Lilstein is cold, Lena says I’m cold too, no, they’re sitting in front of the fire, she smiles, Lilstein lays his head on Lena’s lap, Lena doesn’t speak, yes she does, when the guide says ‘not the Hirschkuh’ she halts, leans on her sticks, looks at Lilstein, and in a serious voice:

  ‘Not a night on the mountain, no berceuse for you, you don’t ski as well as a Swiss light infantryman.’

  They resume their descent, they arrive at the Waldhaus when the sky has already turned cherry red, she turns to Lilstein:

  ‘You don’t ski that badly, actually we could have taken the detour across the Hirschkuh.’

  He throws a snowball at her, she chases him, he falls, rolls over and over, he is on his back in the snow, she looks at him, standing over him, evening gathers, there’s no one about. They are there, listening to themselves breathe. She says:

  ‘Let’s go in, it’s going to turn cold.’

  Frédérique’s daughter points to the woman in the woolly hat in the middle of the photo:

  ‘What happened to Erna? My mother lost track of her.’

  ‘It’s a long story, isn’t that right Max?’

  ‘She’s director of Merken’s study centre,’ says Max, ‘in Munich, conservative philosophy, whereas at Waltenberg she was very Red Front.’

  Max looks around them:

  ‘You know we’ve got watchers all around us, Lilstein? Hobnail boots. Are they here on your account?’

  ‘There’s a fair chance they won’t do anything,’ says Lilstein.

  ‘What sort of chance?’

  ‘At least one in two.’

  ‘If they do nab you, it will present you with quite a dilemma; either they convert you and you become a CIA agent, or else you deny everything, then they’d be forced to send you back to the socialist paradise. And once there you’d be shot, young rebel, for attending a friend’s funeral without authorisation, for being soft-hearted.’

  ‘Still, a one in two chance of getting away with it, Max, maybe better, they’re shooting fewer and fewer people these days.’

  ‘Anyway, if you are suspect in the heart department, it will be a relief for the comrades in the GDR. Thriving are they? Will you tell me what you’re up to at the moment? A little interview on the sale, or should we say exchange, of dissidents for non-redeemable credits. And how do you get on these days with the Ivans?’

  ‘I’m not sure I know them any better than you do, Max.’

  *

  ‘What is interesting,’ Lilstein had told you between two ritual mouthfuls of Linzer, ‘is that everyone will be there, in Grindisheim, you’ll bump into all kinds of acquaintances, people you met in Paris, Berne, Rome, even Singapore, not all of them, but a high proportion, from the diplomatic, journalists, intellectuals, fans of Herr Kappler, other writers, people who’ve come to be in the photos or because it would look peculiar if they didn’t turn up, and all those who’re called the Europeans, a lot of people, a whole way of life, there’ll also be large numbers of policemen, information-gathering agents, counterespionage people, the crème de la crème, it should be great fun, a mixture of the unflappable and the hysterical, it’ll be like a fair or a festival, a place to do deals in, it’s risky but you’ve got to be there.’

  *

  The CIA had also sent a large contingent to Grindisheim, along with one of its heads, rather young for his rank, name of Walker, pleasant and mild-mannered, in a battered tweed jacket with a rather loud handkerchief, orange and black, in the breast pocket. He never needed to repeat what he had to say. He’d confined himself to a role of observer by saying that the situation should stay under control. Concerning the suspect, there was nothing definite in any file but he wasn’t in the clear either.

  ‘That’s no good to us,’ the West German minister had commented. In the view of other Bonn officials, no action should be taken, a small chance that he really was a spy, but a very good chance of provoking a diplomatic incident which they wouldn’t be able to contain.

  As time goes on in the large house in the centre of Grindisheim the tension mounts, they talk to each other with increasing frankness: ‘You don’t give a shit about creating a scandal, you want to nail him, spy or no spy that’s frankly not your problem, you just want to stir things up, you’re not interested in détente, you’re trying to scupper the agreements favouring détente, the new policy in the East and our good relationships with our allies.’

  While they waited for a decision from the Chancellery, the watchers from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution keep the subject under surveillance. In the main room of the house the PA continuously relayed messages from walkie-talkies, a whole network of them in a ring around the suspect and the people he talks to. He’d been given a code name, Blanchot, this gave rise to exchanges like ‘Big Loaf, Blanchot now with Granny’, Granny would say ‘understood, Blanchot under wraps’.

  And in the cortege, men in mourning clothes or sometimes a woman, would take up positions according to instructions relayed by the command unit set up in the house.

  A man has come up to Frédérique’s daughter, medium build, monkey-arse beard, he kissed the young woman, she begins to introduce him to Max.

  ‘Oh, I
know Monsieur Poirgade very well,’ said Max.

  A nod in Lilstein’s direction:

  ‘Monsieur Lilstein, import and export. Monsieur Poirgade, specialises in strategy. So, Poirgade, still with the Foreign Office?’

  ‘Still there, Monsieur Goffard.’

  Poirgade and Frédérique’s daughter have moved off.

  ‘How amusing,’ said Max, ‘the Valréas baton picked up by the likes of Poirgade, when I say amusing ‘Are they engaged?’

  ‘At least that would explain why they made off like thieves. But Poirgade converted to women? Now that would be something. Still, why not? A pretty girl, and her address book full of the names of the old European aristocracy. You didn’t answer my question about the Ivans, young Lilstein.’

  ‘Look, Max!’

  Lilstein’s hand points to the river, the sun is raising backlit mists all over the landscape, the movement of his hand is awkward, Lilstein turns away and looks at Max:

  ‘I don’t see Soviets very often these days, we’re getting old, Max, we are consulted less and less. I don’t read much from you at the moment either. Started keeping your distance? Thinking of retiring?’

  Max’s reply is instant:

  ‘Never! I want to kick the bucket like Albert Londres, in harness, one day, in the middle of a story, a liner, a hole in the water, that’s the way a journalist should go, it would be grand!’

  Max has just finished writing a long article about concentration camps, the collusion, the Nazis, and the collaborators who fled in 1945, their escape channels, the Italian monasteries, but he has problems, no one wants the piece, three chief editors already, all telling him:

  ‘Max, it’s too long, too detailed, time’s not right, everybody knows about this stuff, best wait for a more favourable moment, readers don’t give a damn.’

  Max went back to the camps, Buchenwald, Birkenau, he also traced survivors, here and there throughout the world.

  ‘People who knew you, Misha, they were pleasant with me, an honest conversation, I talk to them so they trust me, when they trust me then they talk, good cordial talk, and rereading my notes I see they told me only what I’d said to them.’

  One woman agreed to talk, she asked Max not to add any adjectives, there are the things they did to us, Monsieur Goffard, it was monstrous, they can be talked about but don’t write monstrous, just be direct, and then there are the things they made us do, for those the word is unspeakable and I’m not sure I’ll be able to speak to you about them, she tried to tell Max, she still felt guilty for a crust of bread she had hidden, for not offering her shoulder to someone on a forced march, for having stayed in the infirmary, she believed she owed her life to the death of others, she found great difficulty speaking, others told Max he’d be adding grist to the mill of Bolshevik propaganda, reminding the Poles about what the Germans had done to them or what they themselves didn’t want to know, a few photos, a few phrases, a row of women and kids on the left-hand page with an SS officer, and on the right a photo of the new Bundeswehr, the Soviets are very good at this type of montage, this isn’t the moment, it’s a very good piece about the Nazi camps, but later, when things have settled down, there are times, young Lilstein, when I can’t come up with any subject that’s suitable for the times.

  ‘Want to give me your piece for one of our papers?’ asks Lilstein.

  ‘Never!’

  ‘Max, why not write a biography.’

  ‘You mean, like Ulbricht’s? Got any unpublished material? On the early thirties?’

  ‘You wouldn’t fancy a few leads about Beria, would you, Max? It would go down very well, I don’t know much myself but I’ll give you whatever I can find, how you get to be someone like Beria, you set out in life to be an engineer and you end up being Beria, a biography, you could reconstruct a whole slice of history, and you’d tell me everything you found, you’d know the life of Beria inside out.’

  They have now emerged from under the trees, the air is cooler, wind from the Rhine.

  ‘Misha, let’s save time, you tell me now what it is you want me to find on Beria. Are you planning some propaganda job?’

  ‘No, Max, really, it’s personal.’

  ‘A woman? Misha, you’re in love with Beria’s wife! Does she live in Berlin? Can you arrange an interview for me?’

  ‘Max, this is serious, it’s just between the two of us, if you were working on a biography of Beria and you could let me know why and how I managed to survive, how it happened, the son of a German Bolshevik Jewess eliminated in Moscow for Trotskyism who outlives his mother. I survived Auschwitz and Stalin, didn’t get a bullet in the back of the head in ’46 or in ’51, I wonder if the explanation isn’t somewhere close to Beria, at least up until the time of his death, why did Beria let me live?’

  ‘Maybe because you were like him? Even so, he put you behind bars in 1951, Misha, you have a selective memory.’

  ‘Surely, but at the start it wasn’t so hard, I mean compared with the Nazis, hours and days on a stool, it didn’t seem like out-and-out torture, they called it the endless screw, the hardest thing to bear about the whole business is that they don’t hit you, if you hurt it’s because it hurts to remain sitting all that time on the edge of a stool, hurts more and more, but you can’t honestly say that these men who are talking to you are hurting you on a level with beating you with a length of hose pipe, that’s the clever bit, you think that if you’re hurting then it’s the fault of your backbone, no way can you use hatred as a way of resisting.’

  ‘So how did you manage it?’

  ‘I needed to hate, I kept thinking this doesn’t come from Stalin, nor from Beria, it must come from someone else, that bastard Abakumov, the swine who gets his vengeance in first, Max, I’ll give you a few leads on Abakumov, you must always have someone available to hate, that’s how I never buckled, and because they weren’t trying to destroy me, I could hear other noises in the corridor, it was horrible, but they never did anything like that to me, why?

  ‘And with my leads, Max, you could write a fine biography of Beria, full of detailed facts, for example their favourite game, when the small inner circle got tanked up with Stalin, at least four times a week, you don’t know what their favourite game was? Everyone played, except the victim, it consisted of putting a tomato on Mikoyan’s chair before he sat down – sometimes they pulled the same stunt on Malenkov – he gets up to go for a leak and they stick a tomato on his chair, he might glance down at his chair just as he is about to sit down, but Stalin chooses that precise moment to shout “Anastasius, what are you plotting these days?” and Anastasius makes very sure he’s looking Stalin straight in the eye.

  ‘He forgets everything else, and splatt! goes the tomato, like schoolboys, but no one ever tried it on with Beria, too scared, Stalin wasn’t, but Stalin was never the one who placed the tomato, Beria had too much on him that he could spill, you’d need to stress the serious side of Beria, Max, the way he managed things, you could never stress Beria’s managerial skills enough, you do realise that in the United States he could have been head of IBM or United Fruit?’

  ‘Yes, that’s good, young Misha, when Stalin dies Beria seeks asylum in the United States, locked up for a few months, many debriefings with the top brass, as there’d been for some Nazis, his abilities as a manager are spotted, turn him loose, but for business purposes only, as to personal preferences he is made to conform, no more teenage girls, not so? Mistresses yes but not underage girls brought in off the street? Even your wife could confirm this? What she says is that she can’t see where you could have found the time, rumours, vulgar rumours? Agreed, but we don’t want any rumours either, if you feel the slightest urge ask Ted, your driver, no, that’s not what I mean, Ted knows the right people, want to make love? Buy it outright. And Beria becomes vice-president of United Fruit, chief of operations, you can forget the rest, exactly the same as with Gehlen or von Braun, that’s the way to do it!’

  ‘Yes, Max, it surely is, Beria as a Yankee
manager, I like it! Beria crazy about development, becomes the world number one in the banana business, and like all world number ones he hates taxes, a five per cent tax is slapped on his bananas by a Guatemalan president, so Beria dines in town, plays golf, poker, maybe with you, and the CIA sets up a military regime in Guatemala to protect his plantations of untaxed bananas, thousands dead, heavy hand of the military, dirtier and dirtier as the years roll by, but no Gulags, just safeguarding free enterprise and top-grade bananas, and Beria, a top-grade manager, keeps his hands clean.

  ‘A biography, Max! True, false, plausible, you would tell it very well, you’d discover why he protected me, include stories about little girls if you want, help make it sell.’

  ‘I don’t want,’ says Max.

  At Grindisheim at around five in the evening, everyone gathered again around the grave, a thousand people in a semi-circle.

  At a sign from the funeral director a man steps up to the microphones, from his pocket he takes a book, opens it, in accordance with the last wishes of our friend I shall now read, in French, a passage from the chapter headed ‘The Picnic’, which is chapter five of the third part of Le Grand Meaulnes, through the gathered crowd runs a ripple not of hostility but of sporadic surprise, merely what happens whenever certain people in a crowd recognise the person who is the object of every gaze and circulate an unexpected name, yes, you can see it’s him, it really is the French Ambassador, not Monsieur Gillet, no, this one’s the French Ambassador at Berne, Monsieur de Vèze, I wasn’t aware they knew each other, it’s odd, a Frenchman reading Le Grand Meaulnes in the middle of a German cemetery, with the president of the Bundestag here, and de Vèze has begun: ‘Everything seemed to have come so perfectly together with a view to making us happy, and yet we have known so little happiness…’