Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  ‘I got on a train, I ran the errand for Lena, she wouldn’t listen, she stayed in Budapest, she had a lot of guts, she was giving a master-class for singers, and between lessons she busied herself with various small matters concerning well-meaning people, to move things on, she loves that city, the weather was fine.

  ‘She took me and three Hungarian friends to a spot a few kilometres out of the city, on the banks of the Danube, a boat house, they took a boat which could carry several people, not a rowing-skiff, one of those very narrow jobs they use for racing, for coxed fours, the three Hungarians row well, I try not to make a fool of myself, she’s cox, she pretends to be our trainer, giving us the tempo as if she were conducting an orchestra, we laughed liked kids, we turned when we reached the Parliament building, it was great, the return was slower, rowing to our starting point but this time against the current, couldn’t sit down for a week.

  ‘Another evening we went in a gang down to the water’s edge, she laughed a lot, a riverside eating place, she swallowed a bellyful of fried gudgeon, she ate them as they were, bones and all, she dipped the gudgeon in the mayonnaise then gulp, and a swig of red to help them down, afterwards she asked the accordionist to play a tango, she danced, at her age, no one said anything, magnificent legs, she was very much admired, also had a big following, marked out, the people she mixed with were being watched by the Hungarian security services, and those people didn’t go in for half-measures, a hundred kilos of explosives, but she was long gone. A great lady, de Vèze, a great lady. At Arlington I cried my heart out, and I wasn’t the only one.’

  In the large house in the middle of Grindisheim, after it was all over, the head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution did an operation assessment of sorts, as a consolation for the men who were about to disperse:

  ‘It’s as well that Monsieur Goffard left with his Ambassador, he was already dining with Prime Ministers before you people were born, he’d finish the evening with them, played poker, and he’s still at it, you never know what he’ll say next, he’s opened too many cupboards, I’d bet that before the week’s out he’ll be invited to dine with the Chancellor. Why? To understand that you need long memories, in 1945 the Americans had a plan for us, Germany would become one big farm, the Morgenthau Plan, you’d all have grown up in the shadow of cows’ backsides, and de Gaulle wanted to be given the right bank of the Rhine, the very same as where we’re speaking at this moment,

  Goffard wrote two long articles saying that the mistakes made in 1918 should not repeated, in his view Morgenthau was making the same stupid blunders as Poincaré.’

  On the side of the Americans and Walker, things didn’t go as well. When he was told that Max and de Vèze had taken a touring plane he blanched, he ordered cars heading for Winzig to stop, lovely late afternoon on a road over the tops, looking down on the Rhine, he cursed, traitors the lot of them, he even kicked a tyre, he demanded an immediate line to the Schiltighaus airbase, to speak into the microphone he recovered his clear, soft voice, it’s only an air-taxi, no diplomatic status, got to show them what happens when you try to make monkeys out of people, no, not fighter planes.

  ‘I want three attack helicopters, Cobras, his Aero is a slowpoke, and I want live ammo, yes, I’m fully authorised, and this French Ambassador isn’t clean, warning salvo with live rounds, I want pilots who’ll go the whole nine yards, we’re going to make him so scared he’ll land on the first piece of level ground he comes to! Hear this, he must land on the German side! And I want live ammunition!’

  *

  In the lounge at the Waldhaus, Lilstein continues to abuse your patience, he talks as though he were confiding in you, as if you were his last hope, he asks if you know what it was that had been scaring him most these last few weeks, prior to setting off for Waltenberg.

  ‘It was in one of those very attractive French magazines of yours, a story about your force de frappe, the pilots of planes that carry atomic bombs, no, they didn’t look very threatening, clean-cut boys, soldiers from the abyss with short back and sides, very wholesome manner, but two of them are ready to scramble, ready to jump into their Mirages, in the photo they’re all reading issues of the same magazine, you can make out the title, I asked my research department to find out about the magazine your pilots read, I was told that Planète is a parapsychology magazine, UFOs, Inca bas-reliefs showing a figure holding his erect penis in his hands, fertility gods, the sort of thing you get everywhere the moment men started making images, but for Planète they are real, authentic extraterrestrial pilots clutching broom handles, Gott verdamnt, young gentleman of France, those boys fly around with hell between their knees and they read magazines written by morons who confuse a large Pimmel with the handle of an extraterrestrial’s broom, what scared the living daylights out of me was the fact that it’s the same on the Russian side.

  ‘An evening with the Russians in Berlin, a dinner, all went smoothly until midnight, and then they started telling stories about fortune-telling, magic, Martians, they all were members of the Party, the KGB, and the Red Army, two generals, a half-century of Marxism and that’s all these morons can think of to talk about after midnight, stories about extraterrestrials, clairvoyance, thought transmission, at the time it made me laugh, to myself.

  ‘But when I saw that your pilots were reading the same sort of rubbish, I started to feel scared, you’ve already seen photos of Americans, each of the men whose job is to fire the rockets has a military policeman standing behind him holding a gun to the back of his head, just in case he goes mad, we’ve got the same thing, it’s reassuring, but what happens if the general who gives the orders to all these men, or his Soviet opposite number, or the Frenchman in his Mirage hears an extraterrestrial telling him go ahead, lad, do it? Our work as cultivated, serious people is to prevent that kind of accident, to pass round rational information, we regulate the tension, that’s what we are, regulators!

  ‘It’s not even in your interest to remain an orthodox Marxist, I mean deep down, if you cling to all your ideals and all your thoughts life will become impossible, there’ll be no one left you can talk to frankly, except me, and I’m becoming more and more sceptical as I grow older.’

  *

  Seen from the plane, the Rhine is beautiful, altitude three hundred metres, vineyards, woods, bends in the river, villages, the great floodgates, the slanting sun lights up the river bank on their left.

  ‘Look, Max,’ says de Vèze, ‘to the west, where the Moselle joins, makes you think of some pretty little valley, it was the great highway for invasions, massacres, we’ll soon be passing Bacharach.’

  A dreamy look in de Vèze’s eye:

  ‘Don’t speak, Ambassador, concentrate on flying the plane, if you tell me about the Lorelei and her lilac-coloured comb, I’ll denounce you.’

  De Vèze smiles, allows Max a lot of latitude.

  ‘I don’t give a damn for legends, Max, nor for the wild beauties of the river.’

  He points to one of the engines through the plane’s window:

  ‘Intake stroke, compression, combustion, outlet stroke, thousands of times every minute, long live technology, Max! There’s a thousand times more crazy beauty in the pistons of that rig there than in the entire history of the Rhine.’

  He leans on the joystick, the Rhine comes nearer.

  De Vèze turns to Max. He knows Max won’t tell him any more about Lena.

  ‘Your friend Linus Mosberger, when we were all together earlier, he took the opportunity to ask me for an interview. He’d like to hear about Pompidou. Was it you who put him up to it? Is your chum Linus to be trusted? Known him long?’

  Linus Mosberger, an old story about a contract, which still does the rounds of editorial offices, writes extremely well, drips experience, de Vèze can trust him, Max is very fond of him, Max and Linus got to know each other properly in Prague in 1938. In those days Mosberger was freelance, an independent reporter, but he’d just signed a contract with the Chicago Gua
rdian, becomes their European correspondent, fifty dollars a week, eighty if war breaks out and for three extra weeks after the armistice which would end the war. For those days it’s pretty good pay but the paper thinks it’s got a bargain, that the war won’t last long.

  When Max meets Linus in Prague, in May 1938, he gets a fright. Linus is just back from Vienna. He is ashen-faced, attack of the shivers, covered with spots, one giant itch, he tries to write two or three pages, a scoop, he could do without this, what he has is more like an anxiety attack.

  Three days earlier, in Vienna, a very thin man shut a door on Linus, turned the bolt, eleven at night, Linus is alone, locked in for the night, he wanders among the tables, Linus has an article to write about what he is about to discover, he wants to begin the article with that, the man shutting the door on him and turning the key, it’s dark, Linus has only a torch for light, he feels as if he’s going to be sick.

  ‘I didn’t want to be sick when I was in that room in Vienna, Max, it’s now that it’s come on me, now that I’ve nothing to fear any more, now that I’m here, in Prague, sitting at my Underwood.’

  The man pushed the bolt home, it’s dark, Linus wanders among the tables, on a large desk there are ledgers, Max, I can’t even write that properly, ledgers, the very thin man, with his black cap and oniony breath left me alone in this room, at that point I was terrified, Max, but not anguished, I was in Vienna, in a large room, I was taking action, didn’t have spots all over my body, not like now, terror in action.

  Linus reads what has been entered with a dip pen in the ledgers, he deciphers what is written, his torch dims, in the ledgers are names and dates, he moves among the tables, then returns to the ledgers, six names of people who have committed suicide.

  ‘Max, I’m never going to be able to write the story, my hands are shaking all over the keyboard, whisky doesn’t help, I went back to the tables with those names in my head.’

  Back to the tables, bodies laid out on the tables, with labels, Linus locates the names of the suicides.

  ‘One of them committed suicide by beating himself over the head, Max, so hard his eyes were expelled from their sockets, another had this serene expression on his face, I lift the sheet, bruises everywhere, only suicides, I wanted to describe what I’d seen but I dropped everything, the medic in Prague told me what was wrong with me, he advised me to go to Carlsbad, I’m about to leave, fields of wheat, hops, rape, the Jewish section, I’d paid the man to shut me up for a night in the Jewish section of the Vienna morgue, only bodies of suicides and urns.’

  Linus had given three dollars baksheesh to an Austrian functionary to let him spend one night in the Vienna morgue, the functionary returned at dawn.

  ‘I asked him about the urns, he said “no family has ever turned up to claim any of them”, according to the functionary all members of all the families were already dead, Max, I’m going away now to see those hop fields, no, there’s no point even in trying to see for yourself, I’ve no idea where they put them nowadays, there are more and more, I’ll try later, ever since the Nazis came the American Embassy in Vienna has been issuing twenty visas a week to refugees, and it’s practically the only one doing so, today the morgue symbolises the whole of History, Max, and I’m going to Carlsbad.’

  Max has fallen silent, de Vèze has concentrated on flying the plane, at one moment he said, without looking at Max:

  ‘What was it like when she sang, Max?’

  *

  As he left the Waldhaus, Lilstein said this to you:

  ‘The greatest danger in our profession comes from noble sentiments and ideals, young gentleman of France, look at what happened to Tellheim, one of the great men of the East-West balancing act, he was part of the team that made the Hiroshima bomb, it’s partly down to him that there wasn’t an atomic war, he gave us the information we needed, Soviet laboratories made up for lost time, he kept them informed for eight years, they only started to have suspicions from 1949 onward, when an H-bomb was exploded in Kazakhstan, the Americans and the British thought that the USSR was still ten years away from doing that, Beria was in charge of the nuclear programme. ‘By ’49 Tellheim has already been gone from the United States for some time, he was at Harwell, he sensed that the Intelligence Service had identified him but he didn’t try to save himself, you grasp the situation, everyone suspects him, in his lab at Harwell no one speaks to him any more, he moves forward in a vacuum, the British question him, let him go, question him again two weeks later, he feels relieved, he dreams of giving it all up, of returning to the GDR, his father is there, now retired, a Protestant, member of the consistory for the town where he lives.

  ‘Instead of slipping quietly away, Tellheim turns up for questioning, and he admits everything, even owns up to things they do not ask him about – well, almost everything, let’s be honest, he kept two or three small items to himself – he threw his hand in, like a man who believes too much in what he was doing and drops everything all at once, the fox snared, but he didn’t get away by biting his leg or tail off, he gave himself up, according to my Russian colleagues it was because he was ideologically under-nourished, he jettisoned the part of himself he could no longer feed.

  ‘In the end, the antifascist man of science packed the game in and made way for the angler fishing for his debts, a gloomy fox, he lived among the English, in a world whose ideas he had to pretend to share, he had two systems of thought, the one he despised and the one he kept hidden, the kind of thinking he despised loomed increasingly large, while the other continued to be valid. The strain was too much for him, he talked to the English who actually would have preferred him not to say as much.

  ‘Today he is a sad man, he lives in the GDR, he’s still a useful physicist for his age, but he doesn’t do much thinking now, in the thirties and forties he was really one of the three or four top men in world physics, he’s gone into a decline, he believed in too many things at the same time, Marxism-Leninism and democracy, science, free debate, he celebrated the benefits of the group but he was one of the strangest individuals of his generation, tremendous pride, he wanted to do everything.

  ‘For our work as regulators, it’s vital from the very start that we shouldn’t believe too ardently in what we do, when I was a young man, too many people advised me to read Lenin, you’re better off reading Shakespeare and Faust instead.’

  *

  When she sang? In the small plane Max does not answer de Vèze’s question immediately, he doesn’t look at him, he looks at the Rhine, the landscape.

  Lena’s singing, now if he could say what it was like, he’d have written it down long ago, once I tried to get it down on paper but I never succeeded, I lack the flair for it, Malraux was right, not bold enough, I’m just not capable of expressing it, all that happens is a tightening of the pharynx when I think about it, I could say a few words but not to de Vèze, too complicated, he likes planes, women, adventure stories, motor cars, novels for men, Max can’t imagine saying to de Vèze very simple harmony, start of the last Lied, Schumann, D minor, first note, fourth, dominant, tonic, the voice initially on a single note, the D, simple chords, then the diminished sevenths, she stood before us, she had arranged her red hair in thick twists coiled in spirals at each side, neckline low, marvellous shoulders, no jewellery, the great lounge of the Waldhaus, just one Schumann, the penultimate evening of the 1929 Seminar, the recital, Stirnweiss cannot continue, Madame de Valréas has said we’re not slave drivers, Stirnweiss sang first, Mozart, then a few Lieder from Woman’s Love and Life, the altitude caused her throat to go dry, she ignored it, Stirnweiss sang very well, surprise, joy, love, fragile voice, Max listened to La Stirnweiss, pure sung delight, everyone reconciled with everyone else.

  Then there’d been a halt in the proceedings, Madame de Valréas had looked daggers at a few smokers and then introduced an American artiste idolised throughout Europe, Lena and her nerve, sheer nerve to start with the last Lied of the cycle Stirnweiss had just been singing, Stirnweiss
had said with a smile I’ll leave the last one for you, Lena had accepted, like a shot, actually not a very nice thing to do when you think about it, off she started, Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan … you were the cause of my first pain.

  Not much in the bass for the left hand for the first few bars, beginning of a recitative not in strict time, without the bass notes differences in tempo are less noticeable, the first beat is a rest, and on the third beat the piano attacks with its major chord of D, ditto at the start of the second line, a rising scale of sleep and death, her man is dead, Max did you practise your scales? How old was I? Ten, twelve? I was already on the living-room carpet eating bread and butter and caster sugar, I loved sight-reading on the piano but scales less, for the following lines, from Es blicket, harmonies held longer and the negative of the sorrowing recitative, the diminished sevenths, the high point on leer, in the Lied’s high compass, another day Lena lying on the floor, on her back, Maxie, be a sweetie, pass me that big book next to the croissants, quarto, glossy paper, at least two kilos, she rests it on her abdomen, breathes in, holds her breath, breathes out slowly, the book sinks back down, what are you doing Lena? Singing exercises, Max, diaphragm and muscles low down, very low down, says Max, if I may say so it’s not very far from a certain spot, are you sure pubic muscles are used in singing? Absolutely Max, that’s where it all starts, if you want to put feeling into a high note you start from there; does a few minutes’ exercise, gets up, stands back to the wall, heels, buttocks, back, head all pressed against the wall, legs apart, hands against her ribs, her red hair thick and untamed, she breathes out, that, says Max, is more decent, still working on those high notes? Maxie, if you knew what I’m doing, I can see, you’re stretching your back straight, you’re controlling the expansion of your rib-cage, that I can understand, she laughs, you don’t know everything, well never mind.