Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  About that copy of Tintin in America, the one that was stolen, the owner told me he was a prize idiot, that he couldn’t see straight any more, that he was gaga, I don’t like it when the owner has a go at himself, because immediately afterwards he has a go at me, he says I’ll get a job at Gibert’s, Gibert’s second-hand department, books by the kilo, he gives himself a right roasting and then it’s my turn, he blames me, you being bloody part-time, if there were two of us here full-time nothing would get nicked, what good will having a philosophy degree do you? Qualify you to sort peaches? He’s pleased with his little joke, the ruse of reason, the passion which acts in its stead, reason which takes the form of a flame, that supposes an overly optimistic vision, go back to the origins, ratio, it’s both the power of knowledge and the content of knowledge, there’s also the rationality of ends and means and the beige coat that’s heading this way.

  The head of the bear on the ground, it wrings the heart of comrade Gédéon, ah! next chapter, Gédéon gives alley cats the milk intended for pet moggies, I don’t see the connection, a sequence in which you get told about a massacre and on the next page milk gets given to alley cats, no transition, no link, after all maybe there never is, there are also rabbits tied up in a sack, how can they be freed? first a sequence showing a massacre in a forest, Gédéon has disappeared, then with no transition we’re confronted with the rabbits tied up in a sack.

  And they’re going to get me too, it’s in the bag, all tied up, my friend has sold me down the river to the CIA, no way out, for years I told him I want you to be inventive, I want you to tell me things I don’t know, I’ll try to be inventive, out loud, here and now, we shall invent two roles, young gentleman of France, just the two of us and nobody else, when we’re together nobody will be able to make a move against us because we shall invent, you will see me inventing and you will invent in turn, and today he’s being inventive by arranging for me to be stuffed in a sack, for thirty-five years I’ve kept him safe from every threat and now he ties me up in a sack, but it’s all over for him, lackey of the Americans, from the outside it looks like he’s in clover, in reality he’s turning into a slave, in his shoes I’d rather be dead, when it was just us two we were in charge.

  I’m going to die.

  The hunters have gone, the job of freeing the rabbits is taken on by the mole, a very mole-ish idea, dig a tunnel under the sack, why do it the easy way, instead of just opening the sack the mole lets off a huge banger underneath it, curtains for the rabbit comrades, bang! ‘gone away, destination unknown’.

  Fine ring to those words, in Berlin we used to say ‘unknown in Records’ or ‘not known at this address’, I’ve known smarter moles, a mole was never meant to work with explosives.

  The two youths who’ve just come in, long hair, yobs, like the ones we have back home, trainers, jeans, bomber-jacket, one of them is carrying a Coca-Cola bag, I know why, the bag is because you can’t get a walkie-talkie in a bomber-jacket.

  The other one has a slightly longer jacket, that’s for when you carry your revolver behind your back, a holster on your belt at the back American-style, now he’s in the back of the shop, the other one has stayed to the right of the door, normally they’d send in a couple, the woman looks at me, stares at me and while she does I stop looking at the man in the back of the shop and I wonder why arms grab me from behind, a bear-hug, my young friend smiles, I’m not even trembling, I’m driven out into the country, to a forest, there you can make a noise, and this time there’s no one telling me it’s going to get very cold.

  Now Gédéon is attacking the wolf, attacking the wolf is always the right thing to do, especially when you’re powerless against the hunters, the French wolf is called Ysengrin, terror of the farmyard, ‘Gédéon and his friend Briffault the dog saw Ysengrin hiding in a barrel where he could keep watch through the bung-hole for the flock of harmless sheep who passed by’, I never liked sheep, someone always eats them in the end.

  The wolf is hiding in the barrel, his tail is sticking out through the bung-hole, Briffault sinks his teeth into the part of the tail that’s sticking out, won’t let go, caudal appendage, in children’s books, a tail is called a caudal appendage, French kiddies don’t know how lucky they are, the wolf can’t get out, he values his tail too much, and the farmer’s wife fills the barrel with milk, terrible mess, in the background there’s a very nice half-timbered building, the outline is clearly recognisable.

  The beige overcoat has stopped by the Flash Gordons, the grey raincoat hasn’t moved, the two youths in trainers have walked out, we don’t do underground stuff, the owner doesn’t like it, pity, I sent them round to the Thé Troc, the bookseller there is a friend of Crumb and Shelton, they’ll find what they’re looking for. And four customers to keep an eye on was hard, the nub of the question is whether reason is autonomous with regard to every other principle liable to deny or transcend it, that’s Hegel, everything which is rational is real, everything that is real is rational, except that reason can only be a product of the interaction of men with the world, that interaction being set in time, in other words in History, I’m sure the owner prefers it when I’m the one who gets conned, I hate all this watching, he says theft is death to us.

  The wolf starts struggling about all by himself in the barrel, he keeps trying to get out but the dog Briffault has sunk his fangs into the part of his caudal appendage which sticks out of the bung-hole, he won’t let go ‘his legs thrashed for so long and with such vigour that the creamy drink turned to butter, and in the end the wolf was so worn out that he was forced to stop’, good children, mark and learn, it is quite all right to be cruel if you’re being cruel to wolves, and only wolves, the hard part comes when you’ve learned to be cruel and you can’t break the habit, especially if people don’t call it cruelty, the sort of cruelty where you don’t see any blood, the butter must be revolting, a slab of at least forty kilos, they’ve removed it from the barrel.

  An enormous pat of well-churned butter with a wolf inside it, they’re going to kill the wolf, no, they leave the butter in the farmyard, they go off elsewhere to celebrate, and the wolf is able to escape because the butter softens overnight, a grave oversight.

  Dangerous chap, oversight, on our side we too were capable of cruelty towards the careless, all you had to do was come up with solid evidence and if the evidence wasn’t solid enough then there was the evidence of the question, the revealing question, an effective byproduct of prosecution dialectic:

  ‘We do not yet know, ex-comrade, if you have been guilty merely of an oversight or if you are deliberately engaged in sabotaging the tasks entrusted to you by the people of our Democratic Republic, but the very fact that we have been led to ask ourselves the question and specifically with you in mind…’

  Crucial that word ‘specifically’, meaningless in the context, but effectiveness guaranteed.

  ‘… this simple question which we’ve been led to ask about you is revealing in itself of the threat which you may well represent.’

  Clever, that ‘which you may well’, poor sod’s as good as in jail already, there is nothing more he can do, but he is still allowed a ‘may’, they used it on me, this revealing question, on my stool, with jabs to my liver and kidneys, the wolf managed to get away, and now we see the farmers selling the wolf butter, eight francs a kilo, nauseating, I must ask my young friend how much eight francs was worth at the time the book was written, he’s bound to know, bloody kulaks, always the same, selling butter that smells of wolf for eight francs a kilo, and they’ll find buyers, when you’ve got butter to sell, you can always find buyers.

  Also I mustn’t look as if I’ve got my eye on these two older men all the time, shop window’s really filthy, I’ll have to clean it, that being said it doesn’t get as dirty here as on the Boulevard, the woman from Unilivres was telling me that if she didn’t keep the dust down every couple of days the books would get a sort of greasy film on them which spoilt everything, she said imagine our lungs, I didn
’t fancy imagining her lungs because on top of everything else she smokes like a chimney, I said to her:

  ‘You should try to give up smoking.’

  ‘I’m fifty-three years old and I’m not afraid of dying, what I’m afraid of is getting the sack.’

  Last year they sacked her most experienced assistant, she was too expensive, the girl in question went home, to Orange, it wouldn’t be as hard there for her in the provinces, also she had her parents living close by.

  Outside the window of the bookshop, in the middle of the alleyway, a man has stopped, oddly dressed, a workman straight off the job or a house painter or a window-cleaner, in a vest, but all he’s carrying is a large plastic bag with ‘Tati’ written on it, the girl at the till is also looking at him, the man has a mop of blond hair, very pale eyes, he’s not looking at the bookshop nor the shop opposite which sells African artefacts, he’s standing motionless in the middle of the alleyway, he’s looking intently towards the end which opens on to the Boulevard, he’s strongly built, muscles like a boxer, you can hear him shout:

  ‘You bloody wogs can keep your traps shut!’

  I knew it, it’s starting.

  ‘This is France!

  It was too quiet.

  Lilstein has stopped moving. This is it, it’s now, an agitator, an incident, the police, they’re going to pick me up, classic trap, this is what they’ve cooked up, a man starts shouting, he comes into the shop, he starts on me, the police, everyone is nicked, the man is tough, a voice that carries, a passer-by just centimetres from him, and it’s as if the man didn’t see him, the passer-by is there in support, this is it, another passer-by, and they say nothing, and if I’d had an escort…

  ‘Foreigners, shut your mouths, in France, declaration, rights of man, article one…’

  The two passers-by would be used to block my escort, if I had one.

  ‘… a foreigner should keep his trap shut!’

  The man has stopped shouting, he looks at me, a trap, that’s it, I’ve had enough.

  Lilstein moves three paces towards his friend in the beige overcoat, he shouts:

  ‘That’s enough!’

  I’ve been protecting him for thirty-five years, a bastard, beige is a bastard’s colour.

  ‘D’you hear, Morel? tell them to end this charade, it’s over! Are you happy now? Tell them to stop! Make them shut that lout up, him and his insults, there’s no point, I’ve had enough! Let them come and take me away!’

  Lilstein has grasped Philippe Morel by the arm, the beige coat is very soft, cashmere, Lilstein speaks savagely but in an undertone, in the alleyway the man in the vest with the plastic bag with ‘Tati’ on it continues shouting, the two passers-by stare at him, nobody else.

  ‘Constitution, article two, shut your traps, especially political asylum seekers!’

  The girl sacked by Unilivres went a year and a half without finding a job, and the day she found something she grabbed it, taking the money in a motorway tollbooth, in the provinces, works nights, a hundred and fifty francs a month more, some nights she notches up almost two thousand vehicles, drivers telling her she’s a waste of space if she can’t tell them if it’s raining in Paris, she’s lucky because she works in a toll area where gendarmes are stationed, the rest of it, drivers who snarl obscenities then zoom off, she’s got used to, and there are two meanings of ‘History’, first a means of knowing which is used for matters for which there can be no rational, theoretical explanation, this sort of history is when theory does not suffice as a means of explaining, and the other meaning is the one which refers to the way societies change over time, that crazy loon with the ‘Tati’ bag is putting the wind up everybody. The man in the grey raincoat looks worried. He’s looking every which way. They’re going to leave without buying anything.

  Philippe Morel smiles at his friend Lilstein, he pays no attention to his savagery:

  ‘Nothing to worry about, the man’s going it a bit strong, but our universal declaration isn’t quite like that yet.’

  ‘Wogs should keep their traps shut, especially the political refugees.’

  ‘Stop worrying, Misha,’ says Philippe Morel, ‘he’s just some crackpot.’

  It’s the first time Morel has ever called him Misha, what gives him the right? Hans used to call him Misha, Max was allowed to call him Misha, what right does Morel have to call him that? No right at all, rather the superiority of the one who betrays, I’m finished, he calls me Misha for short, that’s how the bastard’s mind works.

  ‘Misha, calm down, that man’s no threat, he’ll be off soon, I know, you remember there was a time when five men in grey raincoats would have arrested him, and you with him, today he can shout his head off in public without getting into trouble because we don’t have enough trained men in grey raincoats, it’s progress, you don’t agree? He’ll move on, Misha, and besides there are foreigners and foreigners, you aren’t one of the kind he doesn’t like.’

  The man raises a fist, punches the air, cracked voice of one who sleeps rough:

  ‘And why? I’ll tell you! Why are there all these political refugees in France who’re gonna have to keep their traps shut, eh? Why don’t they bugger off back where they came from and keep their traps shut there?’

  ‘Don’t be scared, Misha, he’s just another crackpot, you’re in France, the police aren’t looking for you, why are you getting so worked up?’

  ‘Morel, tell me what I’m doing here! It’s a trap!’

  I’ve protected Morel for thirty-five years and now he betrays me, he works for the CIA, he arranges a meet in a trap, been in the business more than fifty years and I end up sitting in a trap, Morel says there’s a book he has to buy and we meet up in this alleyway to which there are two exits, they’re waiting for me, an ambulance, Morel has sold me out, he behaves with all the casualness of people who’ve got themselves a cushy number, a lackey of the CIA.

  ‘I’ve spent my life protecting you, Morel, I never had you down as linked to the CIA, you really that fond of Coca-Cola? Let’s go, let’s finish this, an ambulance? or a van? I can’t stay in this place any longer, all these reactionary books, your squalid little manoeuvres, hand me over and let’s have done with it.’

  I’m shaking, I never shook in my life, nowhere, I’m shaking like Regel, that day he threw a fit, he just crumpled in the middle of the lounge of the Waldhaus, that’s exactly how I must look, let’s get it over and done with.

  Morel needed a few moments to calm Lilstein down, nothing was wrong. In the alleyway the madman with the vest and the ‘Tati’ bag had finally moved on. Morel reasoned with Lilstein, no one was out to get him, everything was fine.

  The girl at the till hasn’t even moved a finger, she’s used to seeing the madman pass by, here the owner pays me for working part-time, that’s half the minimum wage, not a penny more, whereas I actually do twenty-five hours, he says he’s teaching me the business, that I’ve got time to go to the university, that if I was working in a half-decent hotel with a restaurant for the same pay I’d be doing ten hours a day, and working late every night, so either reason encompasses History, it has the power to dominate History because it is a permanent entity which resists the temporal flow, or else there is a historicity of reason because thought does not recognise the same possibilities in the ages of Plato, Hegel or Heidegger, but that’s still rationalising History, you could also say that what happens is subject to contingency, I’m getting lost now, in the hotel trade the more tired you are the less you smile, the less you smile the fewer the tips you get says the owner, and the sack the first time you ask for a rise, a reference that guarantees you’ll never get another job, written by an ecological hotelier who grows his own rosemary, gives interviews to the Nouvel Obs and collects money for the rights of man, at least here, in the bookshop, you can complain, but I can’t afford to pay you more, and you can read your philosophy books, you can leave whenever you want, I’ll find someone else soon enough, some young girl, who actually likes being youn
g.

  Morel did not even take umbrage at having been suspected by Lilstein of betraying him:

  ‘Par for the course, Misha, you’re so jittery.’

  Lilstein calmed down, he felt cross with himself for panicking, it was on account of this place, an alleyway, an enclosed place in an alleyway, I like bookshops to open straight into the street and I can’t stand these reactionary books.

  ‘“Regressive”, my dear Misha, “regressive” is the word, “reactionary” is incorrect, besides there’s no such thing any more, there aren’t any reactionaries around now, that was in the days when you had thousands of people working for you, “regressive” is the word you want, but, look at this, yes, this is the book I came to buy, a monument to Yankee ideology, as you say, Misha, I want to show you just how far “reactionary” books can go.

  ‘Look, Flash Gordon, amusing enough, no? Aircraft carriers, aeroplanes, a surprise attack on the United States, by aircraft carrier, planes which sink the American fleet at anchor, yes, you’re right, not original, a carbon-copy of Pearl Harbor, a well-known story, but look here, this page, at the bottom, the date, yes, the date of publication, October 1941, got it? That’s two months before the real Pearl Harbor, two months before!

  ‘Now isn’t that amusing? The Americans are attacked by an enemy fleet, and they counter-attack, it’s still October 1941, can you guess what they counter-attack with? Look at this, that’s right, with atomic explosives, a great story, two months before Pearl Harbor!

  ‘Did Roosevelt and his admirals read comic books? Yes, because comic strips were published every day in a great many newspapers, this particular one appeared on 11 October 1941 syndicated in at least a hundred and fifty newspapers, Roosevelt and his admirals must all have read it in one or other of the papers, over breakfast, two months before the Japanese attack, a stab in the back, all because they didn’t pay enough attention to cartoon strips!’