Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

I did not do so. Having spoken of my attempts to write, I now wondered whether he was obliquely urging me to resume. I also remembered the Herr General’s Ten Per Cent.

On a winter morning, a hush like a pall descended over Europe unknown since the Pact, since Hiroshima. By afternoon, the entire world, San Francisco to Yokohama, Cairo to Shanghai, had halted. Parisians were moving as if on tiptoe, traffic almost vanished, voices lowered, radios seemed charged with supernatural magnetism. Stalin was dead.

He had terrorized millions, killed his people on a scale unprecedented. Co-author of the Pact, he had been vindictive, paranoiac terrorist: in Estonia, he was Bear Ogre, Red Sky Master, fanged Forest Uncle, Bandit in the Fur Coat and, placatingly, Sweetest Old One.Yet for the lonely, timid, drifting and the vengeful he had been a chastening Father, supernal Judge, towering, protective granite, his removal letting in light but opening into the unknown. We read that, in the gulags, even slaves had wept.

Gradually, numbness wore off, clamour began. A new name, Khrushchev, had hailed Stalin as the Father of Mankind. Supported by Sartre, Picasso declared him representing historical maturity. The Red Belt in eastern Paris held a monster parade with banners, huge portraits, music; the Right distributed pamphlets asserting that on Stalin’s orders French communists had collaborated with Germans during the early Occupation, later usurping total credit for the Resistance. Humanité retorted by faking 1940 newspapers headlining Red demands for courage to defend Paris.

More soberly, there was anticipation of danger. The Allied Air Lift had secured West Berlin, defeating Stalin’s plans, but now, in Korea, the UN armies, the USA and Britain foremost, had lost to Russian-backed Chinese on the Yalu. Fourteen thousand Soviet tanks were reported poised to ram Western Europe on the whim of another unproved figure, Malenkov. Officially confirmed was the explosion of the Soviet H-bomb.

Unease was tempered by spring warmth, and all Paris was open to me. ‘Knock, and I will open.’ None knew me, none would pursue me. Without responsibilities, I had obligations only to Wilfrid and was profligate with well-being.

Many Sections were shabby from neglect, shortages, occupation. I was puzzled by ‘Vive Charlemagne’ daubed on a crumbling façade, until learning that a volunteer French Charlemagne Division had been dispatched to defend the shrinking Reich.Wartime jokes were still scattered: Fraternité, Servilité, Lavalité .

Shops, posters, chirpy markets, awnings were dazzling, laughter immoderate, greetings passionate, Quartier Latin diverting as Offenbach, the parks dainty as Perrault. Syncopation swirled down boulevards, subsiding in Faubourg Saint-Germain where shuttered mansions stood sedate above parquet-smooth lawns. I climbed Montmartre, once, briefly, wildly, renamed Mont Marat, though here I attracted glances, sneaky, unfriendly, unavoidable as Marc-Henri’s, recognizing me as no insouciant European above the battle but an unpolished German, kinsman of Ramdohr and Jodl.

Central galleries and arcades overflowed with colour, lovers played each other like guitars, passing entwined, carefree and beautiful, to some plein air table or bar. I found quai Voltaire bookstalls; all was intensified by summer known to Monet, Pissaro, Renoir: flounced trees, speckled water, sketchily trimmed clouds, gay caps and swinging skirts, pirouettes and smiles from cabaret and bistro. Illusions of opera hats, elegant cravats, layered crinolines of the Second Empire and the sleepy gaze of its sensational yet secretive ruler. Flimsy dresses, bare flesh, young leaves were reflected in pools, birds were smart and indifferent as mannequins. Stories flickered on all sides, begging to be remembered. At Port Royal a woman ate feathers, at rue Montaigne an ex-porter endlessly bowed, thanked passers-by, opened the door of an imaginary hotel.

Prostitutes, or likely prostitutes, damped my lust though stinging my curiosity. Reputedly they had profiteered under the Occupation and, like southern peasants, resented the stingier days of Liberation. Many might have born a new, hybrid population growing up around us, perhaps shoots of an improved New Order. Their murmurs, ‘You coming?’ ‘What’s the hurry, mein Herr ?’ were troubling, like an unpleasant scent or jarring tune. Safer, more invigorating, was to lean on Pont Saint-Louis, looking down-river before reaching quai d’ Anjou, wrapped in another hush, that of high, barred seventeenth-century exteriors, austere, legalistic, where no street children twisted hula-hoops, chanted obscene ditties, taunted strangers, romped with a glee I had forgotten at Meinnenberg. When I examined Saint-Sulpice towers from the Gardens, children reappeared but expensively clad, on ponies, sailing toy yachts, rushing for ice cream, shrieking on a hobgoblin merry-go-round. All was rich, sensual theatre: stench from Les Halles, fluttering perfume from a midinette. Other words revived: chatelaine, seneschal, oriflamme.

Sometimes Wilfrid accompanied me. Then the pace, the encounters, were different, the occasions less brittle, sometimes pointed. He would be greeted in parks, a Lebanese bar, a café and, at the place Vendôme, by a grey, stocky man, the painter Max Ernst. Friend, also monitor, he was casually training me to see the familiar at angles slightly tilted. One square, hitherto unremarkable, was place Fabien.

‘Fabien?’

‘Colonel Fabien. Reverenced for killing an unarmed Nazi youth in 1941, thus causing the shooting of forty French hostages.’

Silenced, I looked around at the glittering traffic: all as usual, though last week eleven Algerian militants had been found dead in Canal Saint-Martin, and a demonstration was planned, to commemorate Philippe Henriot, radio propagandist murdered by de Gaulle’s partisans in the last months of the war. The protean nature of Paris. Of Europe.

Wilfrid led me to historic cafés, some with names familiarized since the Revolution: Coupole, Flore, Lapin Agile, Fouquet’s, Pro-cope, Tortini’s, Closerie des Lilas, l’Eléphant; the celebrities argued on the Dôme terrace, at the Rotunda and Deux Magots, sometimes with greetings tossed at him too rapidly for me to translate. More cafés on sunlit boulevard des Italiens, more bookstalls at rue de Montpellier, where he bought me Rilke’s Späte Gedichte , which, while banishing my poetic flounderings, stuck like a dart thrown by a friendly hand, and retrieved an overworld, illimitable, of gardens, wistful animals, some visible though imaginary, grave children, woodland pools, a gleaming, barely reachable Villa d’Este, fruitful dissonances, exacting harmonies, nuanced silence.

Like Father, he enlarged me by tact. ‘I would like your opinion of this…’ A biography of Rosa Luxemburg. ‘You might find this encouraging…’ Thomas Mann. ‘This may be worth a glance…’ Feurbach, on the Individual in History.

He liked to walk unhurriedly to some Seine inn or unfashionable Section, through Maupassant insets: card players at an outside table, children breathless before falsetto puppets, laundry-women quarrelling. He particularly favoured a small Gascon restaurant near rue Hachette, its tiny garden shaded by a plane tree and trellised vines. The burly patron and his wife greeted him like a generous uncle, with whom to converse, not swap chat. Ordering a bottle, requesting a sauce, he was always tentative, then very grateful. A bill was never presented, a bottle always slipped into his briefcase.

In a new, modish gallery, jittery with embraces and compliments, smiles as if painted, a small, dapper gentleman squeaked recognition, greedily swallowed Wilfrid’s studied felicitations on his latest poem. ‘A mishap,’ Wilfrid murmured, on leaving, ‘Laval’s cousin, with a record, at best, unhygienic. Of considerable talent, though the question is…’