Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  ‘Misha, she’s every bit as greedy as you are, wouldn’t I just love to see all three of us in a Washington salon de thé. The patron had brought the hot chocolate sauce in a small silver dish, it had the logo of the General Transatlantic Company on it, Maisie serves herself very methodical spoonfuls.

  ‘Each time a little chou pastry, a little ice-cream, a little chocolate sauce, “you want a taste? No? Chocolate gives you a headache? Me too, but if I’m good and careful I manage to avoid it, what you mustn’t do is mix alcohol, chocolate and lack of sleep, when I’ve managed to get a good night’s sleep I know I can eat a good dinner, with wine and chocolate, provided I can work it off afterwards at the gym, I studied the decline of European diplomacy in the twentieth century, I was taught by a great Austrian professor, Madame Hellström interests me a lot, she really seems to have known everybody, I would have spent hours listening to her, we’d have gotten ensconced at Demel’s, in Vienna, over a Linzer.”

  ‘Maisie seemed to say Linzer in all innocence but I suspect she knows a great deal, Misha, she talked about Lena and Linzer, lost the urge to interrupt me? Feel like you want to run away? I find your silence disloyal. Is it because we’re talking about Lena?

  ‘Maisie asked if I knew that Lena had been buried at Arlington, I said yes, there’d been a piece in Newsweek, I haven’t told her yet that your friend Max gave me the whole story, the low hill, Arlington, bagpipes, dress uniforms, shiny medals on a cushion, triple salvo, all the razzmatazz, no they didn’t do the body-on-the-gun-carriage routine, but it seems people got pretty emotional, top brass and ordinary citizens, music-lovers, women in veils, students, they all admired her, Madame Hellström was a big draw, the occasion even had a humorous side.

  ‘Who was to be given the flag draped over the coffin? No family members present, she had cousins, second-cousins, but if you’re Southern Presbyterians of any standing you don’t want to draw attention to yourself by being seen by the coffin of a woman who never wanted a husband, it was to Max that the honour went, Lena had organised the whole thing.

  ‘The guard of honour presented the flag to your friend Max, who’d stopped believing in anything a long time ago, and especially in the American flag, he’d lost his faith the day he’d lost his boater, at the start of the century, he held up firm when they put the flag in his hands, dry-eyed, like everyone there, Lena didn’t have a sentimental bone in her body, Max saying as he got to the cemetery, “I have a feeling that there’s something intelligent inside me that stops me crying”, and Max found himself shedding tears when Leone Trice started to sing, everyone had been ready for Schumann, something robust, or even a Schubert melody, they’d been expecting the tears to well up but to be able to hold them back, a moment without ostentation, an ochre-coloured moment, the sort she liked.

  ‘And then Leone Trice started singing “Voi che sapete”, people were seated, and the aria, instead of rising through the air, spoke directly to them, “you who know”, Max in tears, half a century crowding back on him with those tears, and he stroked the flag on his knees, Arlington was because of what Lena had done during both wars, a military cemetery, didn’t Max tell you the full story? So what did you two talk about? On a cushion there were medals, Max said to me in his inimitable way “a few bloody medals, they’d make any storybook hero turn pale at the sight”.

  ‘Maisie wants to know everything about how to make Linzer, we shall do what she says, Misha, she’s one of Walker’s deputies, the CIA big man, a decorated veteran of the Korean War and the Cold War, he wants to be appointed an adviser to the White House, Maisie does whatever Walker advises her to do, she follows his lead, a good little black Republican girl, she’s the one we’ll have to deal with, she wants to know all there is to know about Lena, Lena who held Walker in her arms when he was a baby.

  ‘Maisie ate her profiteroles after finishing the cassoulet, she would have liked Lena to tell her what happened during the war, not just the Arlington connection, Maisie is curious, she wants to get her hands on the real file.

  ‘The one that doesn’t yet exist, Lena in 1943, the strained relations with her controllers, the trips to Spain or Portugal, neutral countries, Lena must have met a whole gang of people there, old contacts, she returned to Washington, set off again for Lisbon by way of Ireland, she was one of the few civilians entitled to travel by air, PanAm’s great transatlantic seaplanes, the same ones that she’d travelled in before the war, luxury birds converted for carrying generals and ministers, anyway, tense relations with her controllers, Lisbon, really means nothing to you? Not got a record of anything to do with it? We can picture the scene, dinner in a restaurant for lovers overlooking the port, “dear Lena, I’m so happy to have found you again, it’s hell and yet here you are”, the half-lit restaurant, with Portuguese watchers sitting just a few tables away.

  ‘The man strokes her leg, she kisses his ear, an old friend, he pets her leg under the tablecloth with his right hand, the left he’d lost along with the rest of his arm, was it at Stalingrad? Is he a soldier? Or an intelligence agent? What the hell is he doing there? Lena cuts his meat for him, she laughs, she makes him laugh, she holds out a forkful to him and laughs, the man’s right hand can stay under the table, Lena doesn’t try to stop him, two Lenas, one, high-end, eats, holds out a fork, prattles, the other, low rent, lets a man stroke her leg, is the man a hero of the Wehrmacht! Or a civilian? An aristocrat sickened by the regime? A huge problem, she has the beginnings of an explanation, no doubt when that hand finds its way into her knickers, not too much, I mean don’t let out too much of a sigh, just enough to show the man that she feels something.

  ‘In any case, the watchers have already taken note, you never saw a record of any of this, Misha? You are listening, aren’t you? I think you’re paying more attention now, the lady allowed the man named Berg to stroke her leg in the most outrageous way, she smiled, placed her lips on the man’s ear, at one point he said to her you aren’t just beautiful, you’re worse, the man’s hand sometimes moved out on to the table again, the lady kissed his hand, the hand went down again, the lady became hysterical, she laughed as she stroked the cheeks of the man named Berg, lots of detail of that kind in the watchers’ notes, a crippled German who was now out of control, a hysterical singer, it’s pretty clear to the watchers that this pair wouldn’t take much longer now, the restaurant is dark, many foreign lovers, but that’s no reason, the details are obscene, the watchers are careful about what they say in their report.

  ‘The man named Berg was recalled, never seen again, yes he was, once, remember? As to the hysterical American woman who was sleeping with a German in the middle of a war, she didn’t stay long in Lisbon, in America they must have reopened her file.

  ‘Always the same story, she’d been friendly with the Krauts since 1915, no one ever clarified exactly what role she’d played after 1933, maybe she was just a hysterical case, the people employed by the Portuguese secret police to spy on her submitted their report, and their superiors cheerfully circulated it widely via every one of their administrative channels, and lurking somewhere in those channels there was someone to pass the report on to the German Embassy, and someone else to do likewise for the Americans, a high price to pay for an evening of short-lived excitement, Lena was supposed to be gathering information about the state of mind of the German army, and Berg had presumably been given the job of sounding out this American woman about the possibility of an armistice, you can imagine that dear Lena would have given the Germans information about the state of mind of Roosevelt and his advisers, we had to walk on eggshells, because she was closely linked to the older Kennedy, the Germanophile.

  ‘Mustn’t get uptight, Misha, I’m not trying to make out that your Lena was a Nazi, that’s not what the file’s about, that’s all hearsay, but if I know all about it it’s because like you I know the rest, which Maisie would love to know, because she gets some very feminine intuitions, does our Maisie.

  ‘And also because she’s a musician ca
pable of taking an interest in something that nobody spotted at the time of the funeral at Arlington, a sharp eye, on the list of all the wreaths was one which had been sent on behalf of “the Friends of the Winter Journey”, she’s certain you have things to tell her about that, she also found a note from your colleagues in Bonn, the ones who’d like to see you behind bars, there’s an issue concerning a former civil servant in your Ministry, I mean the real Ministry, a woman, an ex-civil servant in your Aufklärung who allegedly talked to them, story is they gave her a mission in 1956, no big deal, escort a woman on a trip by car from Budapest to the Austrian frontier, a strong-arm expulsion, end of August ’56, no need to get uptight, Misha.

  ‘I realise everyone knows the story, it’s been told often enough, but there’s one small para, “I was instructed to tell the American woman ‘it’s going to turn very cold’, just those six words”, that’s what interests Maisie, what your ex-civil servant said, just those few words, “it’s going to turn very cold”, apparently Lena never said anything about that, she told her debriefing in ’56 that she was one hundred per cent sure that the Soviets were about to attack, she told about how she’d been lifted, a very precise operation, but she never quoted those six little words “it’s going to turn very cold” nor said what they might have meant to her.

  ‘Maisie thinks Lena should have denounced you in 1956, Misha, she wants to know why it never happened; after all, you’d had her expelled from Hungary in ’56 and saved her life, she should have been in the building in Budapest which the secret services of the Warsaw Pact countries blew up the night before the Russian tanks returned, Lena was in touch with the resisters, sorry, the plotters, but you know that we say resisters nowadays, people in the best parts of town, enlightened communists, cosmopolitans, friends of Imre Nagy, bang! a present from Markov, thirty enlightened communist lackeys of imperialism fewer, but not Lena, gone off in a car just before, not willingly, it saved her life.

  ‘Maisie would like to fill a few of the little gaps in the file, she’ll interrogate you about that, and also about the year 1943 and the aftermath, you weren’t there in ’43 but apparently you know.

  ‘After her hysterical hand-in-the-knickers session with the one-armed man, Berg, colonel or civilian? Was he really at Hans Kappler’s funeral? Or did I dream it? Anyway, Lena had got back from Lisbon, took the first plane, in the watchers’ notes the most interesting bit was missing: the envelope, neatly slipped into Lena’s knickers.

  ‘The envelope was very small, microfilm of a report, on a stage in the middle of the room a fado singer almost drowns the conversation, one hand under the table, the hysterical lady returned to the United States in her splendid seaplane, with information about what was going on in Poland, a report comes from various sources, rail tracks all arriving bang in the middle of camp huts, chimney stacks, women, kids, Jews.’

  Lilstein and Morel stopped when they were level with the Pont des Arts. They stare at the building of the Institut. Morel gestures to the left wing of the pile:

  ‘That’s where the Tour de Nesle used to be, a period which people imagine was full of tragic love affairs. For more cheerful kinds of chivalry we have another symbol, look yonder, way along there, the equestrian statue, King Henri IV. In those days … Am I boring you with my talk of kings? You’re surely not thinking of jumping into a taxi? Back from Portugal, with her microfilm, no one was prepared to believe her, apparently she got desperate, she went back in the finest plane in existence, she watched the wing through the window, a marvel of technology, they told her it’s the same wing that’s used for the big bombers that are sent over Germany, she could see herself making her report, Berg’s words, the microfilm. And now they were sending planes to bomb railway tracks in Portugal. And in Washington they just say thank you and do nothing. Don’t they believe her?

  ‘No, they believe her but give the issue a low priority, Lena desperate, nothing’s being done! The question is whether she kept her desperation to herself or whether she did something which was beyond her remit, do I know too much, Misha? How did I manage that? If I told you that in the end I spoke to de Vèze, would that make you happy? Can you see me having drinkies with the man who ran off with my wife? Or was it more simple, that Maisie shared her hypotheses with me? But I prefer talking about Lena, about the way she felt, about what she told her friend Max, who also talked to de Vèze from time to time, lives might have been saved thanks to her and nothing was done, maybe she had a breakdown, the future which turns into an empty-handed ghost.

  ‘Maisie asked what it was with Lena, so categorical in her choices, “you know, Philippe”, that’s right, Maisie calls me Philippe, occasionally “my dear Mr Morel”, but most often it’s Philippe, “you know, Philippe, I don’t trust these categorical characters, agents lose heart if they see their controllers are dragging their feet with their file and invalidating the information they supply, in which case they hand over all they know to people who are more active”.

  ‘To Uncle Joe, for example, Lena and Uncle Joe, that’s what Maisie suspects, at least Uncle Joe ensures the rule of order and purity, and he’s on the march, give Uncle Joe the means of getting to Poland sooner, Stalin’s no tyrant, the whole of the American press have stopped saying he’s a tyrant and are calling him Uncle Joe, because the Americans are refusing to bomb those installations, I’ll hand all I know over to Uncle Joe, everything that’s being said in Roosevelt’s entourage.

  ‘And so, Misha, at a given moment for one reason or another, on account of some tale about railway lines that are allowed to reach certain camps or because of some civil servant asleep on the job, your precious Lena loses confidence, runs out of respect for her colleagues, for her superiors, she didn’t betray anybody, she just started speaking more freely with a different set of people, people whom she quite liked but whose ideas she’d disliked from the very beginning, certain of your sympathisers in the United States, scientists, intellectuals.

  ‘She knew Roosevelt’s entourage pretty well, and she also had equally close links with all the people who might be in contact with Moscow, Maisie thinks that it was while the war was going on that certain items of intelligence material were passed to the Russians using Lena as go-between, leaks of a diplomatic nature before the Conference at Yalta for example, or even before the Tehran Conference, leaks which allowed Stalin to know just how angry he could allow himself to get, and what quantities of equipment they were prepared to let him have, or basic verbal suggestions, all this started long before you were freed, as early as 1943.

  ‘And in ’45 it was maybe that which saved your life. Your pre-war relationship with Lena, at the Liberation you don’t rate the attentions of Stalin’s sorters, you rush off to Asia to rebuild your strength, a few months, then back you go to Rosmar, you still have the profile of the sort of man they continue to eradicate in large numbers, a thirties communist, you keep a dangerous photo in your head, comrade Lilstein, I’m sure you were there in 1932 when Ulbricht and Goebbels staged their joint meeting in Berlin, the great hall of the Friedrichshain, it went very badly, general brawl instead of a confrontation of two antibourgeois points of view, but you’re one of the witnesses, Ulbricht and Goebbels on the same platform, in the same photo that you keep in your head, not the sort of thing you can boast about.

  ‘And then you resisted, were part of the home-grown resistance, prisoner of the Nazis, cosmopolitan profile, they could fix you up with a file as a cosmopolitan collaborating with the English or even the Nazis, they don’t do it, in 1945 they hesitate, in ’46 they spare you, Misha, they give you responsibilities, so there are more important things in life than hunting down trotsko-cosmopolitans, normally you’d be a candidate for a bullet in a corridor and then somebody talks about a woman and says maybe Lilstein could restore her confidence and keep her on board, that’s it, someone in Beria’s entourage says that you could resume contact and restore the confidence of a friendly American woman who is beginning to have doubts about the virtues of Uncl
e Joe, from 1946 onwards, Madame Hellström must be asking a whole heap of questions.

  ‘The Iron Curtain, the tensions, Poland, Czechoslovakia, that woman is worth far more than her weight in gold, but for some time she hasn’t passed anything to Uncle Joe, she’s lost confidence in him. And she’s due to sing in Berlin, lovely surprise, for whom?

  ‘You went to hear her, “Misha I’m so pleased!” she trusts you, she realises that Uncle Joe is turning out badly, but if you’re there all is not lost, problem is Uncle Joe’s entourage, one part of his entourage, his negative face, so you resurface, such an old friend, the positive face of Uncle Joe, you natter away with Lena, everyone’s there, the Russians, the Americans, the English, the Germans, the French, they stare at you, and between the blah-blahing and Lena’s wide eyes, those large deep-blue eyes, you are there, it’s not all over yet, the cause of peace is not dead, in Berlin in ’37 Lena saved you, and you saved her six months later.

  ‘So she quickly makes up her mind, everybody starts feeling scared that there’s going to be another world war, got to redress the balance in favour of peace, discovering an old friend is like discovering yourself, she strokes your cheek, she checks that you are still as young as ever, she weeps genuine tears, “Misha, you haven’t changed one bit, how do you do it? You use a cream?” she laughs, “I’m sure you use a night cream, like women do”, then she reels off a list of creams and laughs at you saying “personally I just use water, it has to disperse, especially crows’ feet, water straight out of the tap, my beautician can’t get over it, plain water, there’s nothing better, in the end my beautician had to agree”, she strokes your cheek some more, top of the cheekbone, she says “hydration, can’t beat it, my beautician uses a similar word but I couldn’t tell you what it is, never mind, and she’s even given up using a pencil on my eyes, pencil’s bad, doesn’t stop you having to use a good cream, but mustn’t overdo it”, that’s all.