Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  Then she sang.

  To start with that last Lied, the sad one, the one her friend had been unable to sing, the one she had left to her, the moment of death, like the one which had to be sung with even more expression than the previous ones, which had conveyed surprise, pleasure or joy, the last one, death, the one which called for a strength of feeling even greater and more intense than the six others, gentle Elisabeth had left it for her friend as a homage, so that she might go one better than her, there was that hiatus in the lounge of the Waldhaus, while Madame de Valréas had withered a few smokers with her glance, then the resumption, she did it cold in a sense, the second part of the recital beginning with Schumann’s last Lied, the most dramatic, the audience waited with a certain impatience to hear what an American could do with this masterpiece of European romantic sensibility, there was silence.

  She sang, and people in the audience knew what was coming, that was why, from the start, for singing like this, it was crucial to be possessed of an unsuspected power of feeling, the declaration, with the very first notes, of the very heart of the piece, the death of the beloved, all the women in the audience are ready to live, relive, anticipate, imagine, transpose, imitate the death of the beloved in music, the pain she makes them feel, not one of them who has not at some point imagined the death of her beloved to see what it feels like, and all the men are ready to listen to the pain a woman feels when death deprives her of the companion life has given her, not one of them who has not already imagined himself dead so that he can see an inner picture of the pain of a woman he loves when she is confronted by the spectacle of his death.

  And all of them, men and women, know how great the need for a delicate quality of voice, the dying fall of one accent into the next, seesawing syncopated notes running trippingly in pursuit of each other, full of pain, they wander, lacerated by pleas, as if the soul were suddenly discovering what it carries within it and to which it cannot deny expression, moans, distress, desires, memories and nameless terrors, syncopated rhythms harassed by quavers, while the spurts of fear take shape, gather into a melody, and the moment ends with a surge in which they become a song of entreaty which calms the milling agitation of the pain, then the initial theme returns, the subsiding of one tone into another, violent agitation of accents laden with savage resolve, all of which makes everyone at the same moment wonder: what is happening?

  Everyone expectant of that succession of tonal adventures sustained by the deep-eyed, lost expression on a beautiful American face, red hair gleaming in swaying coils at her temples, hands clasped so tight they are snow white, a rising chromatic scale full of wild nostalgia, stippled with sudden pianissimi, convulsions of a pain it’s no longer possible to contain.

  And the initial theme returns yet again, trembling, lyrical, exulting, sobbing, advancing in triumph, clad in all the growling splendour of the left hand, a melody almost perverse in the avidity with which it is savoured and exploited, until at last, slowed by lassitude, a long, languid, minor arpeggio wells up, rises a tone, resolves into the major and fades to silence with melancholy diffidence.

  Then she sang, Nun hast du mir … you were the cause of my first pain, suddenly everyone in the lounge of the Waldhaus is drawn as one towards this voice.

  But it was not that at all.

  It wasn’t a song, strictly speaking, it was close to recitative, the words resist, refuse to be caught up and swept away, the diction remains in advance of the melodic line, the voice virtually hangs on one note, the D, at the beginning, a repeated note, and the piano accompaniment tracks it, sustained chords, as if to suspend the time, diminished sevenths, few openings here for pathos, very simple harmonies, D minor, first note, fourth, dominant.

  In the lounge the audience is wrong-footed, music without wings, with nothing in which to trust, with nothing to which one’s soul might be entrusted, you must keep it with you, weighed down by the world, the tonal system reduced to its most simple form, utter simplicity in the sequence of chords, very little in the bass for the left hand, a recitative not in strict tempo, then the harmonies become more tense but not lyrical, drift up the scale, Lena’s magnificent top notes, she used to say high notes aren’t on the top of a ladder, not in Schumann, the voice must be like a wave which breaks on to the high note, makes off with it, leer, the world is empty, the culmination, a D flat, a far cry from the basic key of D minor.

  Not far away in terms of intervals, but far in terms of tonal systems; so to have a D flat in the signature there must be at least four flats, in the key of D minor there’s only one flat, here B flat minor, ears disoriented, embryonic cadence on the fifth, and this D flat is resolved only in the C which follows, for the voice this resolution is achieved after the piano, the cadence will not end, I’m lost, Lena, I want you to tell me what you were doing standing pressed against the wall that day, they are in a car driving up to a village in Haute-Savoie, I was loosening up the small of my back, Max, by straightening my spine I was loosening the small of my back, it’s crucial if you want ringing, free-flowing high notes, to express unhappiness, the lounge in the Waldhaus.

  Previously, the other songs, Stirnweiss, altogether more lively, the ring, the wedding, the child, and the last Lied for Lena, my first pain, a break with the whole cycle.

  Then she sang, another tempo begins, in the cycle and for the public, something is happening, she had begun at the limits of recitative, neither tune nor melody, diction foregrounded, in advance of the melodic line, then the D flat, leer, and for the voice the resolution comes after the piano, a tension, friction of a half-tone, delay in the resolution of the note, for the voice the descent from D flat to C occurs only on the second quaver of the fourth beat, whereas on the piano it occurs on the third, a very powerful dissonance, and that’s what music is.

  She sang, leaving her soul where she stood, with the dross of the world, none of the emotions they had been prepared to feel, it was cold, not cold exactly, the song brought you face to face with death, said plainly I’m not here to spoon-feed you emotion, to hold your emotion by the hand, they had simply been confronted by a song of death, all the work was left for them to do.

  The purpose of music is not to redeem the life you live so badly.

  Max hasn’t answered de Vèze, and de Vèze has respected his silence, then he pointed out divers landscapes for Max to admire. In the distance, in the gathering autumnal gloom, they made out Strasbourg cathedral. They flew on, following the course of the river. At one point, de Vèze got excited:

  ‘Look, magnificent!’

  He gestured to the right bank of the Rhine.

  ‘Not allowed to go anywhere near.’

  Max couldn’t see anything.

  ‘Look, on the bank of the canal, that big construction site, soon two revolutionary hyperboles, two pure forms reaching heavenward, exuding water vapour. Matter in the service of two revolutionary hyperboles, coming soon. Two towers, each almost a hundred metres tall. Not allowed to go anywhere near them. They’ll emit billions of droplets and people have the gall to say that they’ll be a blot on the landscape, I wouldn’t exchange them for all the cathedrals built during their wars of religion!’

  ‘Is that Fessenheim?’

  ‘Yes, they’ve begun work on the site, designed to produce nine hundred megawatts.’

  ‘Then I fear I must disappoint you, Ambassador, there won’t be any cooling towers, the Rhine will do the cooling, old Vater Rhein. River-cooled nuclear, no hyperboles there!’

  De Vèze has sulked for a few minutes, Max asks him to tell him about his meeting with Hans in Geneva.

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘I always do.’

  ‘Kappler was on top form. We went out on the lake in a boat.’

  ‘Did he give you the Winterthur turbine routine?’

  Hans had shown de Vèze the boat’s splendid mechanism; they’d also managed to see Coppet, the tall willows, Hans had perked up, he’d talked about the tomb of Madame de Staël and especially about the page
s in which Chateaubriand evokes the soul of his dead fellow toiler.

  ‘Oh yes, Max, Hans greatly admired those pages, the thought of Chateaubriand, devout Catholic, showing the soul of Madame de Staël the way to Paradise via Byron, Voltaire and Rousseau! Sound values, but enough to ensure she was refused admittance for all eternity!’

  ‘Kappler was very fond of the grotesque side of the Mémoires.’

  ‘I think, my dear Ambassador, that he thought of Chateaubriand as essentially a sylph, anyone who could write a book like that while dreaming of a creature of cloud reassured him, justified the unproductive hours.’

  Walker failed to get authorisation to force de Vèze’s plane to land.

  Next day, in the CIA Boeing which was flying him back to Washington, he cursed Europe one or twice then reviewed the situation with Garrick, his deputy:

  ‘We’re not even sure Goffard’s the goddam French mole or even the guy who acts as decoy.’

  Garrick asked him if Lena Hellström had come up with anything at the beginning of the year and Walker answered quietly:

  ‘She died before she could find out anything at all, it’s an irreparable loss.’

  Chapter 13

  1991

  Is Reason Historical?

  In which Lilstein finds himself once more in a trap and we discover the identity of the mole.

  In which a young bookseller’s assistant keeps an eye on her customers while attempting to answer a philosophical question.

  In which Lilstein realises that The Adventures of Gédéon is a most instructive book.

  In which we also learn how the story of the bear ends.

  Paris, Passage Marceau, September 1991

  If reason ruled the world, nothing would ever happen.

  Bernard de Fontenelle

  It’s very quiet, the untroubled quiet of bookshops, there is a young woman at the cash desk, dark auburn hair, square face, dark eyes, slightly turned-up nose, she has glanced up at Lilstein then looked back down at her notes.

  Lilstein’s Paris friend is already there, beige overcoat, he nods a greeting but does not come over to him, never act as if you didn’t know each other, when people know each other it’s always obvious, it’s barely noticeable but no one is ever taken in, we’ll behave as if we already knew each other vaguely, young gentleman of France, a nod of the head, a gesture of the hand, whichever, we know each other but each refrains from bothering the other, it gives an opportunity to scout out the terrain, assess the atmosphere.

  Lilstein is perusing a large illustrated volume, my young friend assured me there was no risk, but I’m not too keen, a passageway debouching into the Grands Boulevards, block up both ends and you’ve got a trap, they locate me in the bookshop and they pick me up at one of the exits from the passage, a car waiting at each end, an effective trap, it’s what I’d have done myself, I’m making too much of this, everything’s quiet enough, that beige coat is new, he didn’t have it last year, makes him look younger, these illustrated books are rather entertaining, a collection of drawings, rabbits, three rabbits and a duck, the edge of a wood, Sunnyside Woods, the duck has one thought and one thought only: ‘to protect the weak against the strong, no more and no less’.

  Lilstein turns the pages of the book, lingers over the drawings, a story about a duck and some rabbits, I too was a duck, the strong, the weak, a decent enough aim. Escorted by the rabbits the duck does the rounds of the animals in the woods, ‘I will take you to a place of delights, the best paradise of all’, that yellow is just right for the duck, not yellow, ochre, light ochre, I like ochre, the colour of completed things, when the redundant shine has been rubbed off them, someone said that to me one day, the village has tiled roofs, a sort of rusty red, and the grass in full sunlight, the dream of people from northern climes, the duck looks out of the side of his eyes the way sweet-talkers do, ‘you will be rid of your most implacable enemies’, the animals listen to him.

  When I was a boy I really liked drawing animals, a town kid who dreamed of forests, the ochre, the rejection of unnecessary ostentation, it was Lena who talked to me about ochre, she loved it, to describe alto voices people usually talk about grey voices, she tried to put ochre tints in hers, she used to say it takes hours to get a good ochre tone into the voice, this bookshop isn’t making my head spin, what I like about bookshops in the West is that they make your head spin, you go in, you don’t know what to look at first, but here there’s no chance of being disoriented, lots of pictures, not much printed text, children’s books.

  My young friend is watching me, it’s clumsy, not as young as he was, it’s true, despite his beige coat, he’s still my young Frenchman, known each other for thirty-five years, he looks as if he’s absorbed in the book he’s reading but he’s watching me as if he’s up to some tomfool nonsense, personally I’d never have arranged to meet him in an alley, too many risks, no, there’s no risk with him, no trap, he said there’s something I need to buy, come with me, at your age it’s time you got into what we call the comic book.

  Rather droll these rabbits, they’re watching the duck, they’re sitting on their back legs, one front paw against their cheek wondering, they prattle, they listen to the duck’s promises, ‘a good life of peace and calm will take the place of terror and dread’, I don’t like alleyways.

  The young woman at the cash desk saw the two men come in, the beige coat and the grey mackintosh, the older man, the one who’s parked himself in the corner with the Gédéons and the Babars, he’s the same build as Gilles, Gilles isn’t so tall, he’s the older of the two but he stands up straighter, he looks nice, shy and nice, afraid he’s going to bump into things, of upsetting things, but he holds himself straight, it must be the first time in his life he’s been in a place like this, they must have known each other for yonks, they don’t need to be forever talking to each other and smiling as they talk, it’s their fault I’ve lost the thread of my plan, just three days before the essays are due in and I still don’t have a plan, a simple question, why are they asking it? because there’s a chance that reason isn’t historical, that there’s no reason in History, because it eludes History, which means that what goes on in History isn’t rational, careful, don’t change the question, it’s not ‘Is History rational?’ it’s ‘Is reason Historical’, that said, it’s linked, one of the two men looks as if he knows about books, the one with the beard and the beige overcoat, what sort of Reason would not be historical? if Reason looms over History, I don’t even know where I’m heading, three days before it has to be in, the one with the beard must have been insufferable when as a young man, like Gilles, no, I’m being too hard on Gilles, I’m going to need at least twelve pages, last time the prof said you’re not developing your thought enough, I’m too concise, Mum is always saying it takes forty years to make a man, I’ve been living with Gilles now for over a year.

  The duck is talking to the fox, the snail, and with Ursula Owl, Salsifis the badger, Lilstein smiles, Ursula is also ochre, the rabbits are either grey or ochre, a quite solid grey which lightens into blue-grey for the walls of the houses, the sky, the church steeple, a play of graded shades, there’s also a deer, just like in the poem by Johannes Becher, Becher didn’t merely write the words for the GDR national anthem, ‘Risen from the Ruins’, he also wrote about nature, he included a deer in one of his poems, ‘in your goodness, as you pass through the Black Forest you will permit the approach of a wary deer’, that was in 1953, the death of Stalin, the goodness is Stalin’s, now Gédéon the duck is trying to convince Martin, the big bear, ‘you’ll be able to laze in the grass in the meadows all the livelong day’.

  Exactly the sort of thing to promise comrade Big Bear, Lilstein knows a bear who not that long ago would have landed Gédéon a hefty wallop with his paw, not for lazing around but for encouraging others to, it was possible not to work, though without overdoing it of course, taking it easy, provided you gave the impression of working very hard indeed, though not so much giving the impression si
nce no one believed you, but behaving as if you really were, and if everyone can manage the ‘as if’ part then you really are in the land of workers and there is no such thing as laziness.

  It wasn’t laziness, people over-exerted themselves with being lazy but it wasn’t laziness, they pretended to be working because other people pretended to pay them, or else the opposite, during the war it must have been different, but I never fought in the real war, not in the classic sense, in the camps we went even more slowly, except when a guard came along, and besides war doesn’t last for ever, it wasn’t the same for actors, they went at a proper pace, got properly paid too, the Berliner Ensemble four days before a dress rehearsal was a virtual cyclotron, the actors worked really well, and fast, and they weren’t the only ones who didn’t pretend.

  Gédéon is holding a meeting at Burntwood crossroads, a tall copse, the trunks of trees with holes big enough for a boar to hide in, there are two deer in the listening crowd.

  In Becher’s poem, the ’53 poem, there was only one deer, it had just sat down on a bench, by the bust of Stalin, Lilstein suddenly remembers ‘you will stand tall there, Stalin, and in your goodness you will permit the approach of a wary deer; with Lenin, at eventide, it will settle on a bench, and Ernst Thälmann will come and join them there’, in the background the rabbits watch, they look as if they’re having a good time.