The Influence Peddlers

by Hedi Kaddour

  “Do you understand why?” And, after a silence, “a-b-b-a, valor and cowardice are next to each other, they touch, they rub, because basically they are of the same nature, and too bad for valor! A nice presentation, isn’t it?” Raouf had assumed a melancholy air, without the aggression Otto was counting on for the fight. The officer bowed: “You have finesse, sir,” and Raouf, as if to excuse himself: “I had good professors.” Gabrielle to Raouf, later: “He must be saying to himself that beneath your skin color there must be something, but be careful, he didn’t like it when you stole the show . . .”

  Otto became more reserved. They spoke of everything and nothing. Softly, Ganthier told Otto the anecdote of the men in top hats and tails whom they had seen go by on their tandem that morning. Otto responded that they were most probably employees at a funeral home, they often do that, they don’t earn enough to take the tramway, Otto finally asking Raouf if he knew a little German literature, and Raouf: “They never talked about Germany in the French lycée, but I know two poets, Heine . . .”

  “Obviously . . .”

  “And an Austrian poet.”

  “Austrian?”

  “Yes, Trakl, Georg Trakl, a young Viennese woman told me about him.”

  Otto then looked almost affectionate. He pointed out that Trakl died during the war, after the battle of Grodek.

  Kathryn was like a statue. Two days earlier, Raouf had introduced her to Metilda. She had never seen a girl with such pale blue eyes, and just the opposite of a cow. Metilda had immediately said:

  “I was afraid of this meeting. Raouf told me that you are very jealous, but I believe that women shouldn’t be so hard on each other, don’t you?”

  She considered herself a woman. A long skirt, boots, and a white blouse, tie, dark jacket, belted, at the right place . . . They tried to appear natural. Metilda spoke of the ship, and Kathryn of the mistakes one can make on the last day of a crossing.

  “The last day,” Metilda said, “I spent in front of a bowl, in the middle of a storm.”

  She knew how to make fun of herself. That had worried Kathryn, but she ultimately told herself that nothing had happened, the idea suited her, and now, right in the middle of the restaurant Raouf admitted the poems. It wasn’t a simple traveling encounter, poems were worse than a kiss. Fury overcame her. She asked in a joyful voice: “Did you also recite Arabic poems to her?” And Gabrielle at that moment: “Look!” A man was entering the room, bare-headed. Suddenly he was the only one there, a tuxedo, monocle, a pink parasol on his shoulder, in the winter. They were expecting a woman behind him, but he was alone.

  The man pointed the closed parasol at a table. The maître d’ rushed over to pull back a chair. The man with the monocle waited a moment, then sat down. He placed the parasol on the table, opposite him, and he put a hooligan’s cap on his head. At the other tables some patrons were laughing, an actor who was putting on a show? With the snap of his fingers the man was served champagne, didn’t touch it, plunged the parasol next to the bottle in the bucket. Another snap of the fingers, a word to the waiter, who returned with a large plate of French fries and a jar of mayonnaise. There was murmuring in the room as the fries went by. The man showed no emotion. He took a fry with his fingers, dipped it into the mayonnaise, ate it, drank a mouthful of champagne, and continued while looking around the room.

  “That’s not an actor,” Otto said, “He’s a filmmaker. He lost an eye, but the other one is a true camera, it seems that his wife makes him do things like this to battle his shyness. His name is Wiesner, Klaus Wiesner.”

  Ganthier said that he must not be a very great filmmaker. When you do great works you don’t need to act the clown.

  “Oh yes, he’s a great one,” said Kathryn, “Do you remember in Paris, that film Extenuated Death, it was his, he’s the person I’m here to see.” Otto didn’t seem surprised by Wiesner’s eccentricities:

  “He’s a unique character, I know him, they say he’s done much worse things than what he’s doing here.”

  None of the four friends risked asking Otto for details. If he wanted to tell about those much worse things he would; if he didn’t, nothing would compare to the sly joy he might have in leaving an audience of well-bred listeners hungering for some malicious gossip. Raouf avoided Kathryn’s eyes. He knew she was furious. He shouldn’t have talked about the poems. He had met a young girl on a boat; she had become a friend, only a friend; and the poetry was only friendship. Kathryn was angry, but not like usual. An anger with pinched lips, Gabrielle said to herself, a desired anger, a week ago she would have made a scene, right here in the restaurant, regardless of Otto, and now she is angry only because she thinks she should be, in fact, what she’s interested in is that crazy person with his parasol, and Raouf will soon miss the time of true jealousy. Otto asked who the young Viennese woman was, and Kathryn said, quite naturally:

  “One of our friends, very modern. She told us that in her generation no one wants to die at war anymore, or love people who sacrifice themselves for the fatherland.” Her voice was dry. Otto was paying for Raouf’s sins. Before the Prussian could react, Gabrielle asked him a question:

  “What does Herr Wiesner’s wife do?”

  “She’s a screenwriter, a great storyteller, one of the best! The husband deals with impossible stories, but the wife can tell captivating ones.” Otto didn’t seem to want to say anything more. A moment of silence, which Ganthier broke:

  “You’ve still not told me where you were.”

  It was an abrupt change of subject, with no details, as if such a question, asked by a man who was approximately the same age, could involve only a single place, a single time.

  “Most of the time on the Meuse front, in Les Éparges . . .” And Ganthier:

  “I was there, opposite you, with many others.” Then looking at the man with the parasol:

  “Him, too? Is that where you met him?”

  “No, he is from Austria, like Trakl (looking at Raouf), he was hit with shrapnel on their Russian front, now he is German, and ready to defend the Vaterland!” A silence, Otto continued: “He retained a taste for firearms . . . And he was married before.” He didn’t say anything more.

  When Ganthier had introduced them to Otto, Gabrielle told him that she didn’t understand his interest in such a fellow:

  “Or is it the extreme right that connects you?”

  “Let me point out, dear friend, that in public such a fellow gets us through customs, especially these days.” Raouf asked:

  “Do they dislike the French less if they frequent fascists?”

  Ganthier didn’t respond, simply adding that Otto was navigating between several roles, the front lines warrior when he was with his friends, the gentleman in social life, the enthusiast of French literature, in the tradition of Frederick the Great, not to mention other borrowings from Faust and Wagner.

  Regarding the man with the parasol, Otto continued:

  “We like him a lot, not long ago we even came to his aid,” and he went on to tell what happened, a whole whirlwind of hypotheses that got carried away with their sixth bottle of champagne. “Herr Wiesner’s first wife is dead, people talked about it a lot at the time. They say she shot herself in the chest, with her husband’s pistol. That was immediately thought strange. Yes, between the breasts, probably because she wanted to keep their beauty in death, or maybe she thought at the last moment that in the chest it wouldn’t be too bad—thanks to the war our surgeons have become experts in bullets to the chest—an alarming wound, from which she would have recovered, better loved . . . But, unfortunately for her, a lot of time passed before they called for help, that was also bizarre. That was two and a half years ago, approximately. There are so many things happening these days that we forgot all about it. It’s difficult to be a wife in the film world, if you aren’t an actress you’re a woman in the shadows, thus very quickly a shadow of a woman,” Otto was very happy with his chiasmus. He looked at Raouf. Raouf didn’t react. Otto continued:


  “And under the lights there is always another woman, even if she herself is married, you are the legitimate one, you’re jealous, but if that other woman sees your husband more often than her own, it’s because she works with your husband, a work very useful to the art, not like you, you have to let artists do their work as artists, and the other husband is anything but jealous, he’s a good husband, official and placid; the other woman works more and more with your husband in the editing room and it’s always a stupid scene, the one where the legitimate one falls upon the adulteress in midaction, in an editing room . . . And this is where there are conflicting hypotheses, on the details of the activity in which the lovers were indulging, and even on the place, the famous booth or a salon, with the eternal salon sofa, and the question of knowing who is on their knees,” said Otto while looking at Raouf, “and for the rest of it, there is a hypothesis of a somber romanticism. The cheated wife plunges into the clouds of despair, locks herself in the bathroom, and shoots a bullet between her breasts, or she has a more . . . southern reaction. She attacks the couple, the gun in her hand, they struggle, and in the melee the shot is fired, a conjugal brawl, and an accident, but they say that the other woman, who doesn’t deny her presence with our director, only the modalities, asserts that the wife really did go into the bathroom, and that she, the collaborator, can testify that she was always at the husband’s side, a husband who thus could never have hurt his wife—a way of speaking of course—and there is an even darker hypothesis: the lover overwhelmed by the scenes that his wife is making has an empathetic gesture, as in film; empathetic gestures are very dangerous when they’re done in real life, with a real pistol, in front of a wife and a lover. The lovers can then become . . . in French they call it ‘diabolical,’ right?”

  Otto turned toward Kathryn:

  “In America, this sort of thing, how do they deal with it?”

  “There’s a trial, and even several, but the results are usually the same, the man escapes!”

  Otto adding, “Here it’s not always useful to have a trial when very honorable citizens, decorated officers or a very great filmmaker, for example, assert that nothing criminal occurred, they can testify to it. The police really believe any testimony that has social weight, even if the very great filmmaker or the decorated officers were not strictly speaking on the scene. We are in a time of . . . ‘skinny cows,’ as you say in French, so we have confidence in weighty testimony. That has created a lot of discussion on the subject. At the time there was a true competition among opinions, for what would become . . . the common opinion.” There was a silence. Otto smiled at Raouf. Raouf was like a statue, and Otto:

  “The common opinion today is that there was a tragedy in the life of that man with a monocle.”

  “It would seem,” said Kathryn, “that he’s a prince of light and rhythm.”

  “He is our greatest filmmaker,” said Otto, “He causes a lot of jealousy, thus a lot of malicious gossip, especially because it was his own pistol, the weapon of tragedy, a war souvenir. It’s pitiless, the souvenirs we bring back from the war, we always end up using them, in a conjugal brawl, or when faced with a traitor.”

  Otto didn’t say anything more. He now allowed his new friends to take aim at lovers and mistresses, true desire, dissimulation, and vengeance. Those French were full of goodwill, wanting to understand what was happening, Ganthier, a respectable adversary, but French troops were in the Ruhr, behaving like an ax in the forest, nothing respectable about it. Otto smiled. The French as usual weren’t capable of exploiting a situation. They’ve fought with both the English and the Americans. That was like them: cut themselves off from allies who had helped them win, they thought they were the sole victors, they had to be allowed to believe all that, one day the scales will fall off their eyes. Otto wouldn’t say that he had just returned from a training camp run by his organization, two days spent in manoeuvers in the countryside with high school, university students, veterans, bureaucrats, the upper class, aristocrats, or workers—that was the most exalting, the presence of factory workers who came with their bosses, behind the flag, and since the arrival of the French in the Ruhr, more and more of them showed up at the organization’s meetings, the true German people, reformed, and who stopped pouring ashes on their heads, a true victory in defeat. One of his friends had imagined covering four tractors with a camouflage cover. Consider those assault tanks, he said: from then on the war will go very quickly. The infantry soldier must learn to run behind an assault tank. They didn’t believe him, but running was good for you. The path would be long. Otto was confident. Ganthier asked what became of Herr Wiesner’s lover.

  “She’s his second wife, of course, she has him wrapped around her little finger, and from time to time she sends him off to battle his shyness in public places.”

  The next day Gabrielle said to her friends: “I’m persuaded that Otto knows people who assassinated Minister Rathenau last year.”

  After the restaurant Otto declined to accompany them to a cabaret: “Do you really want to see a man in a pulled-up nightshirt being whipped to the sound of a bad tango by two whores in evening dresses? I’m sure that in Paris they do that with more chic.” Raouf took advantage to also decline, in spite of Kathryn’s looks, where was he running off to? With Otto? Kathryn and Gabrielle had insisted that Otto stay.

  “If I agree, you’ll come, too?” Otto asked Raouf. Raouf wondered who Otto looked like. The champagne was affecting his memory. He was sure he had met someone who looked like him, in a book he had thumbed through on the banks of the Seine, not read, I should have bought it . . . an officer, aristocratic manners, cultivated and casual. In the book he had a monocle, was walking across a room, and the author said that he was letting his monocle fly ahead of him.

  The large boulevard where the restaurant was located, the Kurfürstendamm, in the evening became a kingdom of wine, women, song, and the dollar, especially the adjacent streets, with girls with crops and whips who also offered you cocaine and shows “with the forbidden!” Otto was now talking about the transvestite balls of Berlin where hundreds of men in women’s clothing and women dressed as men danced under the benevolent watch of the police. The wildest were the bourgeois participants, “the cradle of our puritanism!” said Otto, “My young cousin told me that, in her school, to be a virgin at sixteen was shameful, to be successful, to be a true leader in her class, you had to have a lot of specific things to tell your . . . friends . . . about what you knew how to do with your body and with the body of a man, and the body of a woman, and with several bodies at the same time.” Kathryn asked Raouf while laughing if Metilda knew that much. “It’s not nice to talk like that,” Raouf replied. He was happy to have shown some resistance.

  They ended up going into Papagaio, one of the chic cabarets on the Kurfürstendamm. Two men in tuxedos, pink vests, white bow ties, bright red lips, and powder on their faces greeted the clientele and seated them in a universe of men with little hair and young women with brilliant jewelry. On the stage the girls were thinner than in Paris. One of them turned her back to the audience, bent over, passed her head and her chest between her legs, and looked at the new arrivals with her head upside down while singing “Willkommen.” They applauded her. Half of the girls, said Kathryn, wouldn’t have survived a casting in a New York club. She saw that Raouf didn’t seem disturbed by the show, much racier than in Paris, is it because of me? Or Metilda? It must be Metilda, he seems somewhere else. Otto drank the most. He tolerated alcohol the best, and was the most talkative. He greeted with small nods of his head several men scattered around the room, Gabrielle saying to him: “You’re not the only officer to come into a cabaret this evening.” He smiled. Those were his friends. They were there like he was—to have fun and gather his strength before the great festivities. He didn’t say anything more, and it took a question from Gabrielle to learn that the great festivities were the ones that would allow the purging of the country and the restoring of the individual, ag
ainst decline, against democracy, the bourgeoisie, liberalism, the modern world—he almost said the American world. He added:

  “But we’re not reactionaries. We want a revolutionary, imperial, and socialist order. Germany will ensure the restoration of the West!” Ganthier, aside to Raouf: “They don’t have enough to buy an ounce of butter and they want to restore the West!” Raouf replying:

  “Compared to Otto you could pass for a leftist.”

  Otto was no longer in a conversation. He was allowing his words free rein, and they let him carry on to try to learn a bit more: politics are not preferable to war, “politics today are war, and besser eine eiserne Diktatur . . . better a dictatorship of iron than anarchy of gold. I marched, two years ago, in a putsch that turned out badly. We didn’t have speakers. Today there is perhaps someone whom we can use for a time, that Herr Hitler, a former corporal, another Austrian. His only quality is that he knows how to speak,” and Ganthier, annoyed: “What does that mean, knows how to speak?” For Otto it was to say to desperate people to look at the foreign tanks in their streets: “Those who don’t dare attack those tanks with their canes will never amount to anything!” Otto repressing a laugh, continuing: “So people give you an ovation. Everyone knows they can’t attack tanks with canes, Hitler foremost, but that gives them the strength to dream, and with that strength they look at the tanks in a different way. We are not nihilists, we want the future of the worker, while keeping capitalism. Marx was right, it is the most powerful form of creation in the world, but first you have to do away with democracy, and nationalism is the explosive with which Monsieur Poincaré provides us in large quantities, with each sound of foreign boots in our streets!” Otto, a bottle of champagne in one hand and a cigar in the other, filled their glasses while proclaiming that there should always be light at the bottom of the bottles.