Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  The Bukharinian poet was in the middle of the cell, we’d formed a circle, he’d put his foot on a stool, he was holding his broom vertical, the bear doesn’t move, the hunter stays there for a moment with his bear, walks round it, struts his hour all by himself, decides to go and fetch the villagers, returns singing, the old man heads back towards the cell-door, he’s making for the village, faint coils of wood smoke, the houses nice and warm, as he walks there comes a tap on the hunter’s shoulder, from behind, it’s the bear, on two legs, fifty centimetres away, the bear gives him a great big smile, very friendly, you can see his teeth, he raises his right paw, palm as big as a hunter’s head, splendid claws, with traces of blood on them, the bear slowly lowers its left paw, shows what he has between his legs, he smiles, says to the hunter:

  ‘Jollywobbles please, or I’ll eat you up!’

  The hunter does what he’s told, the bear lets him go, the hunter goes back to the village puking every hundred metres, locks himself in his house, washes his mouth out, reloads his gun, leaves his house, plunges into the forest, determined step, looks for the bear, finds the bear.

  For the dissertation I’ve got to have at least two examples from the history of science, reason that’s patently historical is the kind whose history can be constructed, the history of a scientific concept, which one? Canguilhem? the reflex concept, the history of a series of theories, but there’s the other sort of reason, that of the reasonable man, who gives up killing, everything in reason that relates to the reasonable rather than to the rational, I’m going to get this wrong, it’s always the same, I manage to cope with the first two parts, describing, trawling through the works, but the minute I have to start thinking for myself I get lost or I knock it all over and can’t put it back together again, I do terrible essays. Old people don’t break the spines of books when they open them, no need for me to worry there, they know the value of things, and when they pinch stuff it’s always specifically targeted, I’m sure it was some old guy who stole that special edition of Tintin in America two months back, the one priced seven thousand francs, fortunately it was an afternoon when I wasn’t here, it was an old guy did that because the owner keeps a close eye on the young ones, dead twitchy straight away, he’ll go and tidy the shelves just near where they are, he stands quite close to them, doesn’t let them alone for one second:

  ‘May I help you? Something you want to ask, perhaps?’

  The owner’s ‘perhaps’ is a masterpiece, unlikely that even the cops have got a ‘perhaps’ as good as that.

  Actually that story about the bear, I’ve let the poet tell it, but I recognised it, I’d known it from way back, Müller had told me it, Müller loved that story, claimed to have got it from Kappler, one day he told me he intended to use it for one of his plays but he never did, here it’s a children’s book, the big bear is dead and the rabbits are dancing round his head, a huge head, larger than life, on the ground, might easily be Stalin’s head when people started dancing round it.

  When Becher stood up in front the Central Committee and recited his poem about the bust of Stalin, the deer and the accordion, people wept, it was at the time of Stalin’s death, I personally never had any occasion to shed a tear, I was still at Magadan, not the worst in the Gulag, but it was already very cold, I saw grown men weep at Magadan when the news of Stalin’s death was announced, and not just among the ones who were guarding us, I saw Stalin’s bust lying on the ground later, in 1956, lying between two tram rails, Budapest, trust the Hungarians!

  My young friend has spoken just once to the girl behind the counter, they don’t know each other, or maybe he’s already been here before to buy something, still it seems odd, a man as serious, as important, in a shop like this, he looks very elegant in that beige coat, this place a really good find for a meeting, too good, I’m spending my time wondering about this shop and I’m forgetting to be careful, I honestly couldn’t say whom I’ve seen walking past the shop window in the last ten minutes.

  Those Hungarians danced a merry jig in ’56, the first bust of Stalin to get knocked off its pedestal, no the first was earlier, in ’53, lying in a gutter, that’s when I became aware of the disaster, hardly out of Magadan I get to Berlin and I’m treated to the spectacle of the German proletariat knocking over statues of the great leader, I got the picture, I’d understood before, before the war, I got the picture very early on, I didn’t dare speak the word aloud, but I knew very early on what Stalinism was.

  I’ve always known, by day I was active and at night I thought, I knew, there was someone who knew and someone who acted, two someones who went under the same name, Lilstein, the Lilstein who knew took care not to get in the way of the Lilstein who acted, and the Lilstein who acted tried not to cramp the style of the Lilstein who knew, and there was never a right dme to clarify things, confronting us was the counter-revolutionary threat, the fascist threat, the Nazi threat, the imperialist threat, the hawks of Washington, today there are clever people who tell us you could have seen what you were doing and who you were doing it with, I did see, but confronting me were people who wanted to send me up a chimney as smoke or melt me down with the H-bomb, I always preferred keeping my sights on the people facing me.

  Rewind the spring, I knew but I said nothing, I acted, even in Magadan I never said anything, in the end I was convinced I was going to die in that bloody Gulag, and I never said a word, wasn’t fear, wasn’t to save the essential thing, even in the camp I never said anything because the Lilstein who knew had no wish to break with the Lilstein who had acted, two Lilsteins, every evening there’s one of them who says to the other cosy up to the butcher but change the world, and the other one laughs.

  Siamese twins, they can’t bear to be together, and they know that to be separated would mean that one would die, no one knows which, both would have died, maybe I might permit myself to know because I used to be pro-active, perhaps I did certain things because I could still tell myself that they were foul things, at the end of a working day you ring for a secretary, you hold out a folder containing a single sheet of paper, you could hold out just the sheet of paper, three names are on it, but in a folder it becomes a file, even if the men haven’t done much, and all you have to do is say:

  ‘Close the file.’

  With all the closing of files we did we eventually built a wall and when we started shooting the people who wanted to climb over the wall as if they were rabbits Lilstein said to Lilstein quick let’s do something which will enable us to dispense with the wall, let’s be better spies, let’s be better plotters, let’s work smarter, it’ll be better, come off it, I knew, I acted, I never said anything, first prize for silence, in Moscow one day Markov said to me:

  ‘Mustn’t drink too much.’

  He already had a diseased liver, he told me people die because they chatter like magpies, a few glasses of vodka and they feel the need to express themselves, in them there is nothing but silence and sobriety, usually they keep quiet, they vote for the most nonsensical proposals in silence, and the same evening in front of thirty people, at the tenth glass, they shout today we did something really bloody stupid, they want to save their souls, bear witness at the tops of their voices, with the courage of vodka, they know that a team will come looking for them at five in the morning and will ask them to be more specific about the witness they’d borne, sober this time, a lot less amusing, when I say sober I mean them, because the men asking the questions can go on drinking, I personally never tried to bear witness, because I don’t drink.

  He was all right, Markov, he looked after me, I looked after my young French friend, that’s what History is.

  With Hegel and his flame, and the bear.

  In historical reason, the idea of reason modifies the idea of History and vice versa, Ortega y Gasset is logical, he simultaneously demolishes a concept of reason, a concept of History and a policy, his own policy is how to keep the masses quiet, how to connect with the political, some statements which are designed to disqual
ify the real, so as to leave place only for market forces, go back to Marx, even if he’s no longer fashionable, the link with exploitation, apparently exploitation has disappeared, take someone like me who is paid for half-time in a bookshop but actually works two-thirds of a week, could you say this was exploitation? You’re getting off the point, irrelevant, an honest conscience which leads you off the point, the owner is always telling me that he wants me to share the results, that means he wants me to work for a commission, he knows I’m not keen, what he wants is for me to work as if I was on a commission but for a fixed wage, I’m going to have to keep an eye on those two old guys, a reasonable animal or a rational animal, I’d also like to work in the idea that man is an animal who cooks, I’m sure Kant stole stuff from Samuel Johnson.

  My Bukharinian poet and his bear, he told it well, the hunter washing his mouth out, going back into the forest, in a furious rage, finds the bear, bang! bear on the ground, kick in the ribs, bear doesn’t move, the hunter stays with his victim, second lap of honour around the bear, hunter decides to go back and get the villagers, goes home singing, on the way a tap on the shoulder from behind, it’s the bear, on its hind legs, fifty centimetres, broad grin, the teeth, the right paw, palm as big as a hunter’s head, great big claws, the bear slowly lowers its left paw, shows what he’s got between his legs, smiles, says to the hunter:

  ‘Jollywobbles please, or I’ll eat you up!’

  The hunter does what he’s told, the bear lets him go, the hunter goes back to the village puking every hundred metres, house, reloads his gun, comes back out again, returns at a run, bang! bear falls down, kick in the ribs, bear doesn’t move, glorious forest, third lap of honour.

  ‘Cut it short! Bloody poet!’

  In the hut some of the men were starting to get restless, but they let the poet carry on, he was really very thin, fairly tall, beard, all you could make out were his green eyes and his teeth, very odd, he still had all his teeth and they were white, again he talked of claws, of traces of blood on the claws, the bear slowly lowers its left paw, points to what it has between its legs, jollywobbles please or I’ll eat you up, the hunter who goes home, throws up every hundred metres, locks himself up in his house, goes out again, charges back.

  He finds the bear, fourth shot, kick, fourth lap of honour, all alone again, decides to go get people from village, tap on shoulder, the bear, big smile, paw rising, the claws, the blood, the bear crosses his arms and asks the hunter:

  ‘Is killing bears the real reason why you come into the forest?’

  The bear and the flame, to have loved the flame so intensely that we ourselves become what feeds it, it was a French poet who said that, a great poet, you have a small chance of surviving it if you don’t drink, if you don’t play around with words, if you don’t try to bear witness to save your soul.

  In Magadan I saw men die yelling at the tops of their voices to save the flame, shouting ‘long live Stalin!’ and ‘long live the Party!’ a volley of rifle fire and down they went like rags.

  Not forgetting the one who made everybody laugh, back to the wall, facing the firing squad, he yelled ‘long live the Tsar!’ crazy laughter, we close our eyes, clamp eyeballs, lips, jaws, we titter, we’re spotted, we’re in prison clothes, an officer shouts at us:

  ‘Think that’s funny, do we, my little woodchips?’

  Comic or tragic we couldn’t say, some of the others were crying, the officer said:

  ‘You’re right to think that’s funny, my little woodchips, or maybe it’s the tchaïfir that’s making you laugh?’

  You sensed he wasn’t going to punish us, he smiled, he called us his little woodchips, Stalin’s woodchips, because when you chop wood you always leave woodchips, he added:

  ‘Humour is no way out.’

  Apart from us no one has come into this shop, where’s that young woman got to? She’s disappeared, now there’s only my young Parisian friend and me here, a traitor and me, this is it, they’re going to get me, for the third time in my life they’re going to get me, instead of admiring his beige coat you should have made a run for it the moment you saw him so firmly settled in this awful bookshop, they’ll get you for the third time and there won’t be a fourth, too old, it’s like when you say I’ll never have time to reread the whole of Goethe, never have time to live another kind of life, no one has come into the shop, the girl has vanished, this has got to stop, at least I can make up my mind to put an end to this ridiculous farce.

  No, she’s there.

  Where did she go? Where can a shop assistant be when you can’t see her? there she is, by the till, she must have bent down, nothing out of the usual.

  The officer barked:

  ‘Fire!’

  File on the Trotskyite-tsarist closed, the man was right to yell ‘long live the Tsar!’, they couldn’t take his death away from him, everybody remembered it, some men sentenced to death never said anything, sometimes they had faces like children who couldn’t cry, I didn’t say anything at Magadan either, for a while I still felt protected, and I never understood that things were going pear-shaped until another prisoner, a big-time gangster, gave me an order:

  ‘Scratch my feet!’

  Among the young crowd, it’s only with Gilles that the owner is at all pleasant, that’s because Gilles writes for the papers, usually the owner is never pleasant with young persons, he says they never buy anything, I correct him, they are tomorrow’s customers, when they’ll have money, he replies by the time they’ve got money I’ll be six feet under, for the essay the main thing is to get as fast as I can to the problem part, though actually it’s a double problem, if reason is historical, it’s to the detriment of pure reason, but when reason is pure it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with History, if I dramatise this paradox, I’ll have part one, and into the second I’ll stick Hegel and the ruse of reason, find reason in History all the same, thanks to the ruse of reason, using what as examples?

  That’s how it goes, the gangster saying scratch my feet, a sign, you thought up until then that you were going to get away with it and suddenly you have to start thinking it’s all over, it’s the opposite in this bookshop, I know this is the end but I don’t see a sign, an alleyway which is a trap, all it takes is a car at each end, you imagine that a friend can never betray you, but though I keep looking I can’t see anything, scratch my feet.

  Until then no thug had ever dared say anything like that to me, they probably knew that I’d made men like them toe the line at Buchenwald, but that day, when their chief said, here, you, politician man, scratch my feet, I knew I no longer had any choice, he must have learned something, he knew more than I did, he looked at me as if I was already dead:

  ‘Scratch my feet for me!’

  The other thugs were watching me, and then he said:

  ‘No, not now.’

  I never had to scratch his feet for him, I could invent and say that at that moment I looked him squarely in the eye, the guy had almost no nose left, his skin was very swarthy, very pitted, the middle of his face an agglomeration of rolls of fat, a sort of hole for a nose, and between the rolls of fat two light-coloured eyes, maybe he backed down because he was scared by the strength he could sense in me, a whole life of Bolshevik strength, a prisoner at Magadan and the experience of Buchenwald and Birkenau, but no, he probably just wanted to check his facts one last time, it was a bet, if you lost the bet your losses would be too high, his feet were unspeakably disgusting.

  He had almost no nose left, you could smell the stench of him at ten paces and he was meticulously cutting his nails as he said scratch my feet, I never had to scratch them for him but I knew that death was creeping up on me, it had just set off on my trail, it was merely hesitating about the speed it would travel at, it was a signal, a thug told you scratch my feet and you knew that the guards had given the go-ahead, that the commandant had spoken to the guards, that the regional rep had spoken to the commandant, that in Moscow someone had taken a decision, not even a decision,
decisions require a report-card, a signature or a stamp, no need for all that, someone must have just said:

  ‘Him? Surely he’s not still there?’

  And a subordinate gets the message at once.

  I was put in a group which went out cutting wood in temperatures of minus twenty, very heavy work, especially when you were with youngsters, those youngsters in the Gulag went at it like mad things, they wanted to prove that an injustice had been done when they’d been found guilty, I was with a man who taught natural science, about my age, he nodded to the trees:

  ‘See, the trees have faith, they’ve seen the axes but they have faith, they’re not afraid, and do you know why the trees have faith although they’ve seen the axes? Because the handles are made of wood too, you know what you can do with faith, comrade.’

  I let the teacher of natural science ramble on, he was not a Trotskyite nor right-wing nor a Stalinist, he just liked natural science.

  I started sleeping like a hare, with my eyes open. When I realised that I was on the point of dying I knew what I’d yell at them:

  ‘Long live Gogol!’

  Up to that point I had said nothing, it would be:

  ‘Long live Gogol!’

  To the guards, the gangster, the men in Moscow and Berlin, it wouldn’t have seemed very political but it was all I had, I could have said bunch of traitors, or up with the Revolution, not yours, but long live socialism anyway, ‘long live Gogol!’ was much wider, less political but much wider, my hatred suggested something else, ‘bunch of bastards’ but that was too predictable, I’d drink tchaïfir, I’d continue keeping a tight rein on my hatred and I’d shout ‘long live Gogol!’ yes, tchaïfir, four hundred grams of tea in a quarter of a litre of water, the tannin acts exactly like opium.

  It was at that point that I was freed, the death of Iosif Vissarionovich, I am alive because a gang of yes-men took a long time to go into the bedroom of the man with the moustache to give first aid, dead drunk he was, we had tchaïfir, but the man with the moustache had real vodka, he took three days to die, looking furious.