Waltenberg

by Hedi Kaddour

  ‘And Richard will thank her, a decent stay of execution, three years of doing work he loves, a dish of gladness served up by his loyal friend, Maisie is his best investment, he’d made a mistake, he’d put it right, the dividends are now flowing his way, a Walker thirsting to be in the know, he’s not old, he signs up for his three-year extension with the CIA, reads the clauses, a kind of cut-price stint, he takes it back to Maisie, she is scandalised by the way her friend FT is being treated, she’ll speak to the director of the CIA, two months later the director in person tells Walker in Maisie’s presence that there’s no way of fixing things differently, and only the first six months are guaranteed, queer street, Walker ages badly in a matter of weeks, pays a high price for his dish of gladness, no more permanent pass, has to be renewed every month, and the fear that the sojourn on queer street might be extended.

  ‘It won’t be extended, in the fifth month the orderly on duty in the parking lot informs him his pass is no longer valid, this won’t prevent Maisie having Walker come in now and again, for a chat, “FT, you all right?” Walker answers yes, he looks well, face getting increasingly crumpled but there’s a spring in his step, Maisie is glad to see that Walker has kept the spring in his step despite what’s been happening to him, a sign of pain vanquished, the pain of a man who won’t give up.

  ‘Maisie just wants the truth about Lena, all facets, Misha, you’re going to tell her, from the beginning, everything Hans told you, everything Max knew from Hans and from his own experience, all you yourself know, we’ll offer Maisie a secret which opens many doors, she’ll love that, she’ll keep it to herself, everyone will come out of it smelling of roses, and we’ll go back to Waltenberg.’

  Lilstein turns white, in a hiss:

  ‘Never, Morel! Waltenberg? Never again!’

  Lilstein on his feet, he walks away from the terrasse of The Lock Gate, Morel hurries to pay, Lilstein has crossed over, has set off along the river bank towards the Pont Neuf, Lilstein has got to calm down, but Lilstein’s voice rises, shrill:

  ‘Their Forum, pointless claptrap! Never! People droning on and on, peddling meaningless drivel, they’ve even got the conductor of a Boston orchestra to give pre-concert talks to the wives of industrialists, cocktail parties for parvenus, everyone stands all the time, all you needed in ’29 was ideas and you could just walk into any group, nowadays even Neuville seems to me to have his good points, I even thought Merken was magnificent, when he spoke there was the same silence as Lena got when she sang, half the audience was thinking “what a bastard” and at the same time they admired him, Merken poeticised philosophy, a perverse undertaking, but it was truly something to behold, and then the evening concert, today conductors don’t conduct orchestras any more, they give pre-concert talks to silly, fat old women!’

  ‘Calm down, Misha.’

  ‘Merchants selling garbage! And the philosophers they invite: selfpublicists who lick the boots of the garbage-merchants!’

  ‘Misha, I never said a thing, look, the equestrian statue of Henri IV, halfway across the bridge, I’m now going to cheer you up, it dates from the Restoration, calm down, it was Louis XVIII who ordered it, the sculptor was an ex-Bonapartist, equestrian statue of Good King Henri. Know what the sculptor does? When no one’s looking he stuffs the horse’s belly full of Napoleonic proclamations, bulletins from Napoleon’s Grande Armée, Ulm, Austerlitz, Iéna, he must have been weeping with laughter.

  ‘Imagine it, Misha, the unveiling, the voices of all those ministers, and hidden deep in the horse’s belly the voice of Napoleon: “they’ll say, what a splendid fellow … I saved the Revolution which was dying…”, the voice of the Emperor, in the horse’s belly, “you are shit in a silk stocking”, the sculptor torn between hate and delight, I love that story with its multiple voices, a legacy left for future generations, you see, Misha? it’s calmed you down, I promise you, no more Waltenberg, let’s walk on, Misha, no car, no one’s going to be lifted, we’ll pick up the game where we left off.

  ‘And for the time being the most urgent business is Germany which isn’t an ashen-faced mother any more nor a winter’s tale, it’s still the German question, has been for centuries.

  ‘My friends in America didn’t like the way the new Germany refused to help them when they went to take a look-see in Iraq, Misha, no one’s asking you to switch direction, you can keep the same targets, you can keep your old moles and you’ll be one of us, don’t look like that, don’t tell me your faith isn’t strong enough, you can stay in the Devil’s kitchen, we’ll go on doing the cooking, it’ll be our pleasure, with new technologies, these new technologies are fascinating, I must show you my model train layout.

  ‘I’ve upgraded it all, electronic controls, we’re going to have some splendid afternoons, we’re not even obliged to tell them everything, no one can get to you, Misha, it may all be creaking like an imminent shipwreck but that’s no reason for losing heart.

  ‘And we’ll talk about the main issue, Misha, I have a fine scheme in mind, youth, think of the girl we saw in the bookshop earlier, must start again from square one, on the invisible front, with young people, ten or so, I know a nice bunch of students, they have dinner once a week in a restaurant I go to, been observing them for almost a year, we’ll go have dinner one Friday, their day, my usual table is on the mezzanine, against the balustrade, good seats to watch from.

  ‘Those young people are amazing, a journalist just out of journalism school, a medical student who’ll be a great, no, not a surgeon, in Paris we’ve got this definition, a surgeon has to have the strength of an ox and a brain to match, this boy already wants to specialise in what we call in-house medicine, the cases no one else can diagnose, he’ll try, he’ll study the symptoms no one understands and now and then he’ll understand them, there’s also a girl with a turned-up nose, very good at philosophy, that’s right, you’ve got it, it’s the girl from the bookshop, but she didn’t want to get locked into speculation, which is just words, so she’s also studying political science, I’ll try and fix it so that she’s diverted into my seminar, reliable as a clock, some day she’ll be a government minister or the general editor of France’s leading newspaper.

  ‘To these we can add a young Japanese, a physicist, he’s working on plasmas, he’s currently based in the university which turns out our infrequent Nobel Prize winners, in France he learned how to laugh, there’s a German, a Franco-German, an IT hotshot, already has a contract with IBM’s centre for computation, and there are two sisters, one’s doing law and the other one doesn’t know yet what she’ll do, she’s the cleverer of the two, around them there are five or six others, these young people are bursting with energy, they have dinner, they go out places, they have fun, they work, they go swimming, they dream, they kick tin cans in the street when they find them, the girls protest, try to make the boys a little more couth, I’ve watched them all, it’s a Vietnamese restaurant just by the Collège de France, spicy sauce and large fans in the ceiling, not at all expensive, there are about ten of them, all young, they comment on everything, they are intolerant, demanding, the other evening they put everyone and everything through the mincer, Cabinet ministers, the husband of the Prime Minister, Madame Cresson, he claimed he taught his wife Mozart and elegance, they left no stone unturned.

  ‘They mock our cinema stars, journalists, money, self-importance, everything, they imitate our singers, have you heard of Johnny Halliday? You don’t surprise me, his name’s everywhere. Last week the young Japanese quoted the singer as saying “I realised that changing your body comes about through changing your mind-set”, one of the boys stood up and starting pumping iron and looking Neanderthal, another straddled his chair and raced around the table going “vroum-vroum”, Misha, they were doing what I never dared all my life, they were behaving badly.

  ‘They chased each other round the table laughing uproariously, they started singing Johnny’s greatest hits, they shouted at each other, they hugged, ordered bowls of rice, poured the
spicy sauce while they laughed some more, swapped plates, drank toasts to Chinese beer, imitated their teachers, said where they could go.

  ‘The journalist did an impression of his editor-in-chief who wants to get rid of hot type and bring in computers for everything, the budding doctor gave the journalist a helping hand, he arched his back and the journalist played on it like a computer keyboard, the editor tries to write his editorial and the machine won’t let him, there’s a computer program in the hardware which blocks long sentences, long words, unusual words, repeated words, the editor gets angry, the angrier he gets the more often the machine goes “beep-beep” instead of validating his sentences, it refuses to write “politics”, “responsible”, “unacceptable”, “constitution”, “institutions” and even “republic”, too long, it also rejects “brazen”, not sufficiently current, and refuses to write proper names when linked with the word “fraud”, a very funny number, Misha, they strung it out for a full five minutes, a very political editorial, very succinct, which ends up “one cannot, in the face of public opinion, do such things”, of which only “one”, “opinion” and “things” remained, the editor-in-chief Coqueret, he’s quite famous, also has his own TV show.

  ‘After the sketch the hurly-burly started up again, they interrupted each other, stopped interrupting each other, sang a mix of current hits and ‘O sole mio’ and ‘Marinella’, took each other by the shoulders, made a tremendous racket, told each other the plots of films, of books, about the struggle between Yeltsin and Gorbachev, and a cat-fight between top models, you know how … you know our ways, I’ve forgotten the names of the models, all I recall are three numbers, 88, 61, 92, it’s not at all the same with your girl-swimmers, they talked very fast, about the way African hair-styles are designed, the new fashion, very expensive, I know now that it can cost five thousand francs, with gold-thread in the braiding, one boy’s hand glided over the table, through the bottles, he was imitating the overturning of a statue.

  ‘The statue of your Dzerzhinsky, a giant crane in the Moscow night and the archangel of the Cheka rises into the heavens, they laughed, one of the girls turned to the young IT whiz-kid you must be a prodigy, he replied there’s no such thing, there are no precocious children, only the spawn of fuckwits, a good crowd, if one started getting uppity the rest would merrily saw through the branch he was sitting on, and then they were off again, on the next table to mine a man had a few words with the proprietor who answered “that’s life, sir, the future, I weep tears for Saigon and they put the world to rights”, the man said “some world that’ll be”, the proprietor laughed, he added “in any case we won’t be there to see it”.

  ‘I like this notion of putting the world to rights, Misha, the temperature in the restaurant started rising, people thought these young people were loud, vulgar, too much alcohol, at this point the journalist stood up, good-looking boy, tall, dark, hair cut very short, dressed in denim dungarees, he tapped his glass with a knife, another lapse of taste, and he started reciting a poem, “La Chanson du mal-aimé”, of course, you know it, it’s more than thirty years since you told me you knew kilometres of poems by heart, you see, on he goes, in the restaurant something happened, people stopped eating, the boy didn’t leave out the Zaporogues, he recited the whole thing, slowly, the half-mist, the waves of brick, the scar, the people who sell their shadows, the graceful ship, the burning beehives, the derrière of a Damascene damsel, the demons of chance, the backwards descent, the cafés swollen with smoke and the white bodies of women in love, a long poem, he had the knack, Misha, the secret is not to speed up.

  ‘Mustn’t hurry the words, on the contrary, let them hang, make the audience wait for the rhymes, the words, the rhythms, if you go too fast people start waiting for you to get to the end, they stop listening, but if you let the words hang they wait for every little occurrence, does what I’m saying ring any bells with you? Slow down, keep ’em waiting, interpretation as a form of suspense, that’s right, it’s Kappler’s last lecture, at Freiburg, three weeks before he died, he spoke about Goethe and the work of the actor in Faust.

  ‘When he got to the end of “La Chanson du mal-aimé” the whole room applauded, the patron came bearing a large Norwegian omelette, shouts, sparklers, the little group sang “Happy Birthday” to one of the girls, the presents came out, the girl shrieked with delight, yes, Misha, it was the one who was at the till, earlier, she nearly recognised me, she took the hand of the boy in the dungarees and never let it go. A girl’s face, Misha, when she senses she’s holding the man of her life!

  ‘She was holding him by his right hand, eating with her left hand, that’s the advantage of Asian restaurants and Norwegian omelettes, you can eat without ever letting go of the hand of the person you’re with, the patron said champagne on the house, the other tables grew more animated, everyone clinked glasses, heads spun, they drank head-spinningly like in the old days, when there was a wedding, then the young people left, through the window I watched them go for a moment, they were heading for the Seine playing leap-frog, it was eleven o’clock, they hadn’t used up a tenth of their energy yet.

  ‘It won’t be any ordinary recruitment exercise. Recruiting them on whose behalf? I’ll tell them the story of the Histoire des Treize, and no one will ever again be able to make them believe that they are here to serve a sentence.

  ‘They’ll go off to the United States, Yale, Columbia, the whole nine yards, they’ll make new friends, they’ll come back, they’ll circulate, some might run a think tank, people are obsessed with working in small groups behind the scenes, the Bilderberg Group, the Institut Montaigne, the Boston Thinking Group, the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, the Schiller Gesellschaft, even the Russians are at it, the Stolypine Society, people who tell each other everything, you’ve got to know how to glean, these young people will be a quick study, they’ll meet up on the ski slopes or in Martinique, Brussels, San Francisco, they’ll go round and round the world whereas we used to spend just a few hours in a train.

  ‘It’s getting late, Misha, let’s try to be something once again, let’s introduce these young people to the recipe for a good Linzer, those young people are seeking, they want to know, they want to reshape the world, they want to be empowered, and let’s not forget the most important thing of all, the thing that for so long enabled us to get up in the morning because it dispersed the melancholy which makes you look at things as they are, let’s not forget the risk, Misha, you know they don’t look as if they would but sometimes these youngsters do get depressed, they believe that there are no forbidden pleasures, we’ll show them that there is at least one, that it comes with a risk every morning.

  ‘Your friend Kappler was like you, but he didn’t play, he was a puritan, and that’s why he spent all his life shuttling to and fro between two worlds and why he killed himself, he neither got to the forbidden fruit nor what you called the third shore.

  ‘We’ll invite some of these young people to step right into the wizards’ lair, in Washington, I’m sure the girl who studies political science will appeal to Maisie, then we’ll send one or two to earnest old Walker to give him something to do in his retirement, the bitterness, the coarseness, the disagreements, he’ll get them hooked, he’ll tell them about Lena, that’s right, Misha, I’ve also met Walker in private, Walker’s last visit to the old lady, a chalet by a lake in Vermont, she feels weary, she’s shrinking more and more into herself, “FT, I’m so glad to see you, it’s so sweet”, the stroll along the lake shore, Misha, Lena walking slowly on the arm of a man she knew first as a baby, Lena’s great big eyes looking into Walker’s, “FT, why did you come?” – “Lena, we’ve got a problem”.

  ‘Will you help me to envisage the scene, Misha? March 1969, Lena has heart problems, Walker has come to suggest ways she can get a whiff of springtime in her nostrils again, a trip with him, it’s vital we give a voice to what happened that day, Misha, it cannot be allowed to die, Walker came to ask Lena something, the lakeside is so beautiful, they wal
k slowly, when he told me about it Walker was sitting in his kitchen, he spoke slowly, he tried to describe the shore of the lake, he tried not to omit any of the words she had spoken, slowly he repeated the suggestion he’d made to her, on 12 March 1969, “Lena there’s someone in Paris someone who does for the Russians what you’ve been doing for us for fifty years, you’re the only one who can pick up on this, we’re chasing a tone, Lena, scattered notes, maybe you can find the key, and the signature for the key”, that’s what Walker said, Misha, this is happening in the time of Nixon and Brezhnev, you once called them mangy sheepdogs, Lena Hellström was set on the trail of the mole, seven hours in a plane, she has heart trouble, happy as Larry, she looks out the window, the ocean, the clouds, cathedrals of clouds under the wings of the Boeing.

  ‘She watches out for Europe, to Walker she says in confidence “I’m going to make the most of this, I’m going to meet up with a man I should never have stopped loving, I should have married him before the war, the First War, an argument, he wanted to go and play soldiers, we could have stayed in Switzerland, a life without troubles, I tried to persuade him, he left”.

  ‘Misha, Walker told me that this story mustn’t be allowed to turn to dust, Lena had met up again with Hans Kappler between the wars, at a time when they might have picked up the pieces, 1929, the Waltenberg Seminar, remember? How you used to bend my ear about that damned Seminar! In ’29 Kappler told Lena that he’d gone off to fight in that abomination that was the First World War because she’d slapped his face, it was the most painful of his memories, but Lena didn’t remember any of that, no doubt Kappler was making up painful memories to justify walking out on her at the time, “FT, I never slapped him, he swore I did, apparently that day he tried to kiss me but I wanted an argument, he said he’d told me he hadn’t come to argue, I know him, he would never have said anything as vulgar, according to him that was when I slapped him, I stayed very cool, I slapped him and off he went to the war, it’s all so long ago, FT, I can’t remember anything, maybe the slap was intended to gain time.” ‘Walker related all that as though he was the one who’d been slapped, Misha, his chin was resting in the palm of his right hand, he was talking about two lovers who meet up again fifteen years later at the Waldhaus, I told him you were there too, Lena thought that Kappler had made up the slap to justify himself, because in 1929 he was in love again, not with Lena but with a much younger girl, all he was really interested in was the girl whereas Lena wanted to live with him again, “I skied, I sang, I was beautiful, FT, my best years, he didn’t want to, I don’t think the girl wanted to either, it was too late”, in the plane from Paris Lena was happy, she said “We had plenty of time to calm down, I’ll help you, FT, and then I’m going to join him in Geneva, I’ve written to him”.