Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

She licks Thomas’s neck, lips, breasts, armpits, desires crowd in on her, she kisses his navel, moves down to the cloud of dark hair, thinks his man-hair is beautiful, his sex has shrunk in the calm shadows, no more threatening than a comma, as on a Michelangelo, she swings her hair over it, she begins to sing softly.

‘So I’m not going to be allowed to read the scene which steams up this chalet in the mountains, Max, couldn’t you at least let me add a fireplace, a blazing hearth?’

‘Or a pier-glass in veneered mahogany? Now it’s you who are writing novelettes, the story hasn’t even begun yet.’

‘You mean this fornucopia isn’t the climax of the tale?’

‘I shan’t be publishing any scenes of fucking.’

‘Sixty years from now, Max, on the manuscript, it would make an interesting variant, variants give life to books.’

‘No variant.’

‘So there won’t be any culminating point to your story, nor even a climactic turn of phrase such as you get in the Arabian Nights, a moment of pure poetry, “the buttocks of the young man were so beautiful that the eighteen young girls began to sing”?’

‘No scene with fucking, I shall be elliptical, I’ll pick up the story just after.’

‘And what did Thomas do just after?’

‘He did what you or I did.’

‘He went back to sleep?’

‘He went off to the war, after marrying Hélène, she didn’t agree with the war, but she was Swiss.’

‘He was like us, bit of a socialist, hostile before…’

‘His name on the B list of people to be arrested on the first day of the mobilisation.’

‘And in your country as in Germany nobody was arrested because everybody agreed with everybody else, it was to be the war to end war.’

‘He acted with heroism.’

‘Your military medal?’

‘To which you can add the Legion of Honour and the croix de guerre .’

‘ Und ein leg less.’

‘Hélène didn’t care for that at all, Thomas came home in 1917, a hero, even the Paris papers had reported his gallantry, an exemplary record, schoolteacher, a pacifist, a son of the people, a captain within three years, six times wounded, defended his position at Verdun to the last man and brought back his wounded CO — one of the Langle de Carys, a Catholic and a royalist — crawled, though he himself had very little feeling in his right leg, genuine front-page material, with coloured-up sketches, they had a field day, but Hélène didn’t care for it at all.’

‘1917, your best period, there was some wavering in the ranks.’

‘In yours too,’ says Max. ‘Hélène was working in an armaments factory in the valley, she was discreet but well-informed, when Thomas came home she starting talking to people: Zimmerwald, Kienthal, the conferences supporting revolutionary peace, she took part in strikes.’

‘Was she arrested?’

‘Don’t be silly! In France, my dear fellow, you don’t touch the wives of heroes.’

‘They gave her her head?’

‘They took good care of her, but that too is a long story.’

Hans and Max are sitting on two metal chairs, a woman in a dark anthracite uniform appears behind them, they didn’t see her coming, she has a small metal cylinder hanging from her waist, a cylinder with a handle, like the ones bus conductors have, we were just leaving, I can’t help that, two turns of the handle, she holds out two tickets, ten sous please, she moves off in the direction of a small boy who has just sat down and leaps up the moment he spots her, hey you there, the boy runs off.

Max and Hans have stood up, they have walked on for another hour among the flâneurs, the children, the gardeners, they watch the women walking and try to spot feet that might stumble, with her it’s the left one, you lost, it was the right, they never agree, they lingered to watch the chess players, Max took Hans by the arm when he sensed that his friend fancied a game, they went on their way until they came across the croquet players and there it was Hans’s turn to make Max walk on, Max laughed saying that for once I have a temptation which is easy to resist! They passed quite near the cluster of hives just by the gate that opens into the rue d’Assas, bees were still busying around, flashes of brown and gold.

They spoke of the not-too-distant future, for once they would be spending a longer time together, a meeting in the mountains, intellectuals, politicians, artists, economists, scholars, philosophers, neutral ground, an obscure mountain fastness, in Switzerland, Max is to go there for his paper, Hans because he is a member of the ‘Committee for the United States of Europe’, it will take place in six months, right at the beginning of spring.

Max has asked Hans if he’d have time to accompany him to Brussels, I’ve promised a young writer I know that I’d take him, Brussels and Antwerp, we’re doing a tour of the paintings of James Ensor, Skeletons Fighting over a Herring, King Plague, he’s been mad about the artist for ages, he wants to see the originals again, the great Belgian orgy, delicate doesn’t come into it, The Exception Giving the Rule a Kick up the Backside. Do you know Ensor’s work?’

‘Not really. Who’s the young writer?’

‘Shows real promise of becoming a great writer, we met half a dozen years ago, he ducked out of school to write, he’s already knocked about the world a bit, he was in Indochina when I was in the Riff, we used to tell each other about the things we’d seen, he was braver than I was, war reporter, anticolonialist, slap-bang in the middle of Saigon, now he publishes art books, he has already written a novel, it’s a very ambitious novel, East v. West no holds barred, and on the side he publishes short, funny tales, I’ll introduce you and one of these days too I’ll take you too to see Ensor’s paintings, the truth of the century, Christ entering Brussels, terrific, Christ riding a donkey, banners saying ‘Long Live the Social State’, honest wives being groped in the procession, foaming glasses of beer and Jesus, three sheets to the wind, delivering a blessing on the whole shebang.

‘He’s a painter of great character, if you don’t want to buy one of his paintings he takes it off its nail and puts it on the floor, like a mat, he’s also got a gift for turning a brilliant insult, “demolition man with a sucking mouthpart” for instance is not at all bad to describe a critic.

My young writer friend loves it. Ensor also does small drawings from life, the beach at Ostend, men playing croquet on the sand, and girls too, Indian ink, three strokes of a brush, and it’s all there, the nine hoops, the mallet swinging like a pendulum between the legs, and the wind blowing among the players, the air is the hardest to do, did I ever tell you I played croquet with Lyautey? It was in Rabat, at the Residence, two years ago, just before Pétain had Lyautey turfed out of Morocco, look, some people never see anything coming!’

Max shows Hans a young woman sitting on the knee of the young man she’s with, the chair lady comes up, the man laughs.

‘Hang on,’ says Max, ‘just watch.’

Hans and Max stand stock still.

The young woman has stayed sitting on the man’s knee, both of them snigger at the chair lady who goes off and comes back almost immediately with a policeman, the man and woman get to their feet, move off, blast on a whistle, the forefinger of the gendarme points in their direction, the couple turn, freeze, everyone is staring at them, the policeman’s finger bends into a hook, reels them in with an imaginary line, the couple walk back to the policeman who marches them off to one of the police boxes outside the Senate. Max takes Hans by the elbow once more.