Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  For a rabbit to have a good time, all you need do is give him a mouth shaped like a V, all the animals are there, their eyes have the pupils in the corners, that leaves a lot of the whites of the eyes showing in the drawing, makes them look attentive, drawing is a very suitable activity for a man’s retirement, I’ll go back to it, an activity that doesn’t cost much, table, chair, paper, pencil, four walls around you, it all depends on what kind of space they enclose, nine square metres, that’s a prison, actually you can live in nine square metres in a town, but if you don’t have enough money to go out much it’s like a prison, fortunately there are supermarkets, and an electric hot plate to cook on, my room is ten square metres at most, that’s what’s left when I subtract the floor-space of the lavatory and shower, a maid’s room, apparently I was extremely lucky to have found one on the Boulevard de Port-Royal, especially with lavatory and shower.

  Every evening around ten the woman next door plays the accordion, I’ll have to revise my budget, the cost of living is very high here, food, I was good at drawing, until fifteen, sixteen, especially objects, turn-of-the-century telephones I could do very well, and cars, I even did some watercolours, but I wasn’t as good at bodies, I never knew how, my cousin Agatha was the one who was really good at bodies.

  Terrific nudes, genuine art studies, during the slump she used to sell them to lads from the lycée so she could buy food and clothes, one day a boy showed me a drawing of a woman with her legs wrapped round a man’s waist, head back, unsigned, Agatha’s style, twenty times more expensive, I thought she can’t be short of anything, she went to America, found work as a draughtsman.

  Another glance in Lilstein’s direction from the girl at the counter, the older man, the one ensconced in the corner with the Gédéons and Babars, he’s not the shop-lifting sort, the man who owns the shop told me you must never go by appearances, I’m too hard on Gilles, he’s not that awful, the only thing that grates is the bin-bag, last night he got home at eleven, he saw the bin-bag in the middle of the hallway, he said it smells, I was in bed, the only chore down to him is to take out the bin-bag now and then, that’s a journalist for you.

  When I said that he didn’t like it one bit, he said that if philosophers started seriously bothering with bin-bags no one would believe them any more, that’s got nothing to do with it, and philosophers don’t ask to be believed, they try to be rational, does Reason have a date of birth? That’s not the problem, the question of the historicity of Reason isn’t about the date of its birth, or death, you see the trap, the ready-made answer, Reason died at Auschwitz, the sort of remark that leaves the exercise of Reason to the brutes, the dominants, be careful with ‘dominants’, the prof doesn’t like Bourdieu, I was in bed, Gilles went down to the yard with the bin-bag, when he came back up he rang the bell so I’d have to get out of bed, I didn’t, the neighbour banged on the wall, I went and opened the door, I turned my back to him and returned to the bedroom, and he had his keys all the time, he said no I left them here.

  Don’t forget Fontenelle, ‘If reason ruled the world, nothing would ever happen’, sounds OK, yes, but it’s not enough, that said it’s the first arm of the pincer, if Reason dominates History there are no more events, no, that’s not my pincer, first hypothesis, if reason isn’t historical then History cannot be rational, but second hypothesis, second arm of my pincer, if reason is historical there can be no absolute of Reason, that’s where you stick Fontenelle in, Gilles made a lot of noise in the living room, it lasted half an hour, finally he came to bed, with the newspaper, it’s amazing how much noise a newspaper makes, Gilles sighs, seen my keys? that really made me see red, but he put on his helpless voice, like he does when I’ve got to help him do his accounts, he said I’m sodding fed up, can’t find them anywhere.

  Lilstein turns the pages, the wolf looks a nasty piece of work, maybe it’s just because he’s showing his teeth, a lot of the white of his eyes showing too, it’s like in the cinema, eyes very wide open, black and white comedies, Cary Grant shows a lot of the white of his eyes, I’ll have to buy another video of Philadelphia Story, in Berlin it must have been Honecker who forgot to return the one I had, it’s a damned peculiar life where you lend the leader of your democratic republic an American video, he could end your career by raising one finger, everyone watched everyone else, end the career of the first person who made a mistake, but watching a film with Cary Grant and James Stewart was no longer thought of as an error though there was a time when you could have paid a heavy price for doing so, I’m exaggerating, no one ever paid a heavy price, that being said, you lend a video to the leader of your democratic republic, you can hardly ask him for it back, you realise things are changing the day he says Misha I must give you that video back.

  Where videos were concerned, Honecker wasn’t the worst offender, he’d return them, he would even lend some of his without making a big fuss about it.

  He was easy to deal with compared to Mathias, the former trade union owner, then retired, Mathias had a superb collection of videos, recordings that had come from the West, he had Angel with Marlene Dietrich, he loaned out his videos, he would offer to lend, he’d stand by his shelves, raise one finger and say:

  ‘From each according to his needs…’

  Gives me a tape:

  ‘… to each according to his abilities, culture must circulate.’

  I always returned his videos, but over time he began saying I’d lost some, he ticked me off for not going to see him, when I did go he was delighted, and within five minutes he’d throw the business of the nonreturned videos in my face, his wife used to give him funny looks, they probably talked about it all the time, I’d arrived after leaving the office, about nine one evening, they gave me a warm welcome, I carefully avoiding talking about films, we were snug and warm, I was pleased to see them, but Mathias never lasted out for more than five minutes, he always found a way of bringing up the videos I was supposed to have lost, it wasn’t true, and he knew it would make me want to leave earlier than planned, if he hadn’t I’d have been glad to drink a tisane and a small plum brandy, but I’d go away without having anything, he wife would say ‘So soon?’ it wasn’t quite a question, it sounded like a question but the sort of question to which you know the answer, as though it confirmed something she’d said before I got there, something like:

  ‘You’ll see, he’ll hardly have his foot through the door before he’ll be off again.’

  People like Mathias criticise you for not going to see them, so you go, they criticise you over the business of the videos, you decide to leave, they criticise you for going, Mathias would nod in my direction and say to his wife ‘this is his idea of a visit to old friends’, we’d be chatting in the hallway, the conversation might very well revert to being pleasant, I might almost have drunk that tisane, with a plum brandy, but Mathias would always get round to saying:

  ‘Go, don’t strain yourself.’

  I always fell into the trap, I was really rather fond of them both, ‘using his persuasive eloquence Gédéon convinced his assembled listeners, he made them understand that there were better things to do in life than going round gobbling each other up’, that’s well said, do they have video recorders in the prisons of the reunified Germany? I’ll have to ask Honecker’s lawyer, when are they going to cart me off to jail? as I’m leaving this kiddies’ shop? No, prison is official, with these people there’ll be an interrogation first, out in the sticks, with a medic to keep an eye on my blood pressure.

  About the keys, I said to Gilles we’ll see tomorrow, but I got up, I didn’t say he was becoming impossible, he had them when he came home from work, they weren’t lost, we’d agreed we would always leave them in the plate on top of the central heating, where mine are, you see, we were both starting to feel cold, both of us in just T-shirts, while we were hunting for the keys, I found Dilthey, I must use Dilthey, A Critique of Historical Reason, also find a place for that quote from Faust, ‘In the beginning was the deed’ and don’t fa
ll into the trap, there’s also Ortega y Gasset, got to see clearly that historical reason, the affirmation that reason is historical, is for Ortega the means of putting an end to pure reason, the Enlightenment and the Revolution, mustn’t mix up the first ‘reason’, extra-historical, which can or may seem to be realised in History, with the second, the historical reason which literally refers back to what has befallen man, so use Ortega as a way of shifting towards Heidegger, even if I’m not all that keen, about the keys, search instituted high and low, hallway, living room, kitchen, I was sleepy, Gilles waited for the moment when I was about to get angry so that he could criticise me for being angry, I said to him:

  ‘A metallic sound.’

  ‘What metallic sound?’

  ‘Like the noise keys make when they fall.’

  ‘Keys falling?’

  ‘Are you positive you didn’t hear the tinkle of keys falling in a dustbin?’

  The deer, the partridges, the tawny owl, the young wild boar, the heron, the pheasant, the rabbits, the dogs march past beneath Lilstein’s fingers, see how the duck leads them all to an old abandoned farm, they are going to build the house of peace.

  When things were going well in the country which Lilstein calls home, they called it the house of peace and socialism, the duck and his friends haven’t got to the socialism bit yet, good for them, just plain peace, not a bad start though, peace, the end of savagery, in the poem by Becher, the one with the bust of Stalin and the deer on the park bench with Lenin and Thälmann, there was also an accordion, ‘an accordion will play to say thank you to them and they, grateful and modest, will smile’, here there’s no accordion, no bust, but there’s food, Gédéon arranges for them to be fed.

  ‘Grub and lots of it’, actually it’s practically the route to socialism, we’d almost succeeded on the grub front, not like the Russians or Poles, our cars were pathetic but the grub wasn’t that bad, ‘made with all the kitchen left-overs garnered throughout the land’.

  Now that’s not socialism, that’s sabotage, or shall we say a malfunction of the bodies responsible for forward planning, ‘left-overs’ indeed!

  This will be corrected for the next mobilisation campaign, we’ll rectify, add a few abstract words.

  The alleyway outside is too quiet, my young French friend hasn’t a clue about organising a meeting, the bookshop’s too quiet, it’s like the block of flats in Moscow in 1945, some evenings everything would seem normal except there were no kids making a racket, no slanging matches between neighbours, too quiet, somewhere up on one of those floors everyone knew there was a flat that was going to be raided, during the night or around dawn, no one had said anything but everyone knew, does the girl at the counter, with her turned-up nose, know anything?

  And here come the real enemy, the hunters, feathers in their hats, leather breeches, genuine Bavarians, the swine, a slaughter in the farm of peace, when no one’s expecting it, they rush in altogether and start shooting, that being said, animals who live in the forest can’t afford to forget about hunters, just because you say you’ve moved into the farm of peace doesn’t mean you’re safe from attack, from an Operation Barbarossa, buckshot, that’s for the head and belly of deer and partridge, though in the drawing there aren’t any deer or partridge.

  But there were, in the house of peace, only a little while ago, but there are none now in the slaughter, there’s no blood either, just green, ochre and pale blue, a boar lying on the ground, a stag, a bear, a big one, they’re not bleeding, they’ve crumpled, exactly right for tough-looking victims, no kids on the ground, no women, just the death of the big males, that’s all, no sign of blood anywhere, an expertly executed massacre.

  Hunting, first light, my first time, trudging, the hinterland around Rosmar, the dog, a wire-haired dachshund, the friends, the field of carrots, schnapps, the dachshund disappearing among the carrot leaves, when he stops to point, all you saw was the end of his tail wagging vertically above the greenery, I shot my first hare, bravo Misha, my comrades congratulated me, I put my hare in the back pocket of my jerkin, I went on, lovely country, the plain, a light headwind over the ploughed fields, the occasional knoll, a spinney against the sky, and the hare started moving against my back, very disconcerting.

  I must tell my young French friend, he’s always talking about skeletons in cupboards, it sounds sinister but at least inside a cupboard a skeleton doesn’t move, whereas a rabbit that starts kicking you in the spine when you thought it was good and dead is quite something, not to mention that you have to get him out so you can break his neck.

  ‘No, not with a stone, you must learn to do it cleanly, a chop with the side of the hand!’

  The sole effect of comrade Gédéon’s militant naivety has been to provide an easy target for the class enemies of the workers of the forest, a fine old slaughter, that’s what you get when you build the house of peace before wiping out the class enemy, in our case we wiped out the class enemy, when I say we I include everything that’s happened since ’17, and then we went on wiping out so that we wouldn’t be wiped out ourselves, that’s what we used to say when we felt the need to talk about it.

  In this unhappy hour, the denizens of the forest have one last piece of good fortune, which is that it’s the enemy who is killing them, not their friends who have turned into public prosecutors, these Gédéon books are so sweet, very educational. I don’t like being here, it’s a rat-trap.

  Gilles didn’t like my idea about the keys falling into the dustbin, in the middle of the night, two overcoats over our T-shirts, shoes but no socks, the outhouse where the dustbins are kept at the far end of the courtyard, I hate all this nonsense with keys, no light in the outhouse, the bin’s full, did you bring the torch? He dared asked me that, and it’s a month since he was supposed to buy a battery.

  We pulled the dustbin out into the yard, under the timed light, we heard a window go up, whoever opened it didn’t put the light on, Gilles said in quite a loud voice:

  ‘I bet he’s going to phone the Gestapo.’

  We didn’t hear another peep, we took the bags out, they smelled.

  On the right in the hallway, Gilles had left his keys on a bookshelf, on the right as you go in, I found them there when we went back up, lying on the cut edge of The Critique of Dialectical Reason, there’s nothing worse than bookshelves for swallowing things, even books, day before yesterday I lost my Kojève again, I need it for my essay, historical reason can be the opposite of pure reason, of the faculty for generating principles, you see what’s at issue here, the link between pure reason and Revolution, do away with pure reason in order to do away with the idea of Revolution itself, Ortega y Gasset-style historical reason, it’s the end of reason-in-History, is historical reason still reason? How am I going to pull all this together? Go back to the two notions, reason and History, and examples, got to have examples, references, reason of State for instance, and against that the reason that gave the Rights of Man, State reason as a negative example against the requirements of law, yes, but can there be human rights where there is no State? State against instinct, man as a reasonable animal, reasonable or rational? going to have to dig deeper.

  Poor Gédéon, ‘he who was so happy to see the rabbits dance the foxtrot to the sound of a harmonica, he whose soul had thrilled with delight to see the chicks disporting themselves on the sweet grass of the meadow’, very flowery turn of phrase Gédéon old man, but you must learn to grow up, to stare disaster in the face, the disaster that comes after the fox-trot.

  We used to dance the fox-trot at the Waldhaus, Lena danced the fox-trot, Kappler would say, go ahead, young Lilstein, I’m too old for that sort of thing, but he wasn’t really that old at the time, Fox-trot in Waltenberg, could be the title of a sophisticated novel, late twenties, Lena also danced the tango, she held me very close to her, she lifted her thigh against my hip, she was American so people waited to see her do the fox-trot and she would deliberately kick off with tangos, Gédéon wanted a ballroom, and he got
a disaster, it took me a long time to grow up, when you looked at Lena’s fox-trot, it was as good as her tango, of disasters I’ve seen a few, starting in the thirties.

  The worst is when the spring uncoils, when it was you who screwed up because you didn’t see it coming, no, that’s too easy, too many people about nowadays who say I never saw it coming, I was still a child, the age of illusions, I had too much to do with the enemy, I went on believing too long, no, the illusions were inertia, I’ve never had illusions.

  An amusing half-page, rabbits dancing in a circle around the head of a dead bear.

  Very representative, the bears, in the Gulag a poet, a Bukharinian, jailed for Bukharinian deviation even though he never had the first clue about what Bukharinism was, this poet had told a bear story, he’d got it from a German, a Silesian joke, we were talking one evening to take our minds off how hungry we were, the Bukharinian poet decided he would tell the story of the rabbit and the fox in Alexander Nevsky, we all jumped down his throat, then he said:

  ‘I know what the moral of my life-story is, I thought I wanted to be part of the Revolution, my story is also yours.’

  We let him speak, trying to stop someone speaking is only funny if you know that you will actually be able to stop him, we knew that he didn’t have that much time left, he was too thin, he talked like an actor at his farewell appearance, he retreated a few steps, put a broom on his shoulder, walked back towards us sticking his chest out, a hunter in the middle of the forest, a very jaunty step, suddenly he’s facing this huge bear, on its hind legs, more than two metres tall, the dream of every self-respecting hunter, takes aim with his broom, the bristles against his shoulder, bang! the bear goes down, the hunter goes up to it, take care, gives it a kick, no reaction, places his foot on the bear.