Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

In which Hans Kappler feels dizzy as he hears a Lied being sung in the Waldhaus Hotel.

In which the Swiss Army suddenly looms.

In which young Lilstein gets drunk on French cognac.

Waltenberg, March 1929

The mountain, the Waldhaus, the peace to begin with, the clientele of skiers, and then on the Saturday morning within hours it all starts to buzz, Baroness Valréas in the vast lobby like Napoleon at Austerlitz, with her staff officers, secretaries, her executive director, her daughter Frédérique, and Erna, the debates secretary, she calls them her ‘brigade’, and Merken’s wife and the wife of Regel, Merken’s rival, the room booked for the philosophy seminar is too small, maybe, but it’s out of the question for the philosophers to be put in the room booked for the economists, and the large lounge-cum-library has been earmarked for the political sessions which will be chaired by Monsieur Briand; the private secretaries start to play dirty tricks on each other, the chamber-maids and valets of the principal guests meet up again, yes, last time was London, then again there’s the whole of the hotel’s staff, less sophisticated, who keep an eye on the valets from the city, to see how they do things but refuse to be taken in by their fine airs, they’re the same as us, they obey orders.

Some arrive by car, the bodywork of some cars is made of different kinds of precious wood, others prefer the cable-car, more amusing, each time a cable-car arrives it brings two or three guests and the next cars come up with their trunks and their servants, each time a car passes a pylon it dips, some pylons are very tall, if you’re sitting in the front it’s quite terrifying, like being on the Figure of Eight, the passengers got very cold and Max found a moment to say:

‘The last time it was just here the floor gave way.’

The seats of the cable-cars are covered with midnight-blue plush, the plush is changed annually, large trunks being wheeled round and round the lobby, the frantic bustle in and of itself is hardly worth a second glance, it’s when one of the trunks cannot be located that it becomes entertaining, Maynes’s wife, for instance, the ballerina, has lost her main trunk, not hysterical, never in public, merely on the verge of tears.

The husband in a panic. John Maynes, Sir John, is reshaping the economy of Europe and he’s in a panic about a trunk, yes, it’s his wife’s, no, there are no gems in it but even so, important things, a cabin-trunk, one side for hanging clothes, the other with drawers, no, not monogrammed canvas, nothing common or garden, genuine English leather, dark, very handsome, must have been left on the Paris train, the train that has carried on to Coire and not just Coire, it goes to Vienna and Istanbul, Maynes, one metre ninety, stands out head and shoulders in the lobby, don’t worry, I’ll get a car and catch up with the train.

Madame Valréas says no you won’t, but not to Maynes, to him she says:

‘John, we’ll try and find a solution.’

She cannot in any way contemplate the prospect of his tearing along the road to Vienna, a disaster, he’ll be gone for at least two days, that’s without reckoning avalanches, all this fuss over a bird-brained ballerina’s knickers, oh yes, in the end Maynes told me that the most important item in the cabin-trunk was his wife’s underwear, he’s one of the major figures attending the Seminar, he’s not to budge from here, we’ll find another solution, we’ll send a telegram.

In the garage, Mrs Maynes’s trunk was in the garage, a silly mistake by a servant, not one of the hotel’s employees, they know their business, it must have been a servant of one of the participants, good, that’s all settled, Madame de Valréas has embraced Maynes’s wife.

The merry-go-round could now start up again, in full swing now, ladies’ maids in dark coats, cloche hats, they size up the hotel maids, they soon get the picture, don’t be nice to them, you tell them what to do, but careful how you go with the head housekeeper, she gives no quarter, she treats you as if you were a guest but if you’re not on the right floor or if you use the guests’ stairs you get a ticking-off sharpish and you’re reported to the Baroness’s office, so know your place, it’s the rule, and the lift is out of bounds.

In the lobby, Maynes is very pleased to meet up again with Édouard, Van Ryssel’s French novelist friend, they haven’t yet got the key to their rooms, the trunk has been found, they take time to talk, and Mrs Maynes knows she mustn’t interrupt her husband when he’s talking to a writer.

Whenever she loses a trunk, all she has to do is look glum and John can think of nothing but her, it’s delightful, but one day I interrupted my husband when he was chatting to Mrs Woolf, I can’t stand the woman but they say she writes wonderful novels, I told them if you’d care to come back down to earth we could go in to dinner, John didn’t say anything, they got up pleasantly enough and all through dinner they made small talk, I would have liked them to continue their discussion with us, when I’d interrupted them Mrs Woolf was talking about the gulf which splits masculine intelligence in two, I thought she’d be keen to pursue this with other women but actually she went out of her way not to say anything interesting, and every time it seemed that she might John always managed to bring the conversation back to small talk, he’s very English that way. I didn’t say anything, not even afterwards, I truly think he doesn’t realise what he’s doing when he’s like that, if I made a scene he would know and it wouldn’t make a scrap of difference, I prefer to reserve any scenes I make for the women who run after him.

So Mrs Maynes leaves her husband to chat with his friend Edouard. It’s an Edouard who’s on top form, smooth face, black hat, long cape, long legs, he is very proud of his long legs, Maynes doesn’t let him get a word in edgeways, he has read Edouard’s latest novel in French, all this novel-within-a-novel business isn’t the crux of your book, what I like about it so much is the way you deal with those hearts of gold, family men who want morality to be the gold standard of existence, the character who’s a judge, his name is Moulinard, I think he’s so funny! side-glance from Maynes at the fair young man who is with Édouard, Édouard hasn’t introduced him, Maynes would like to ask him his name, but that might make Édouard cross.

If Édouard hasn’t said anything to me it’s because he doesn’t trust this young man who can’t be all that attached to him, don’t say anything, the young man won’t always be with dear Édouard, this Moulinard of yours, Édouard, the more he demands total truthfulness from his children, the more they lie to him, a heart of gold who asks for words of gold, the ultimate value, and all he gets in return are lies, false coin, it’s exactly like economics, no good trying to base anything on the gold standard, it was all right before 1914, your novel is spot on, gold is a folly, Mr Churchill re-established the gold standard in Britain, it led to inflation and unemployment, I’ve explained all that in a short tract, I’ll give you a copy, The Economic Aftermath of Mr Churchill, what’s needed is what you make your young hero say at the start of the novel, ‘let’s give credit’, obviously you aren’t talking specifically about economics, but the young man eventually decides to ‘give credit’ to his mother’s good taste, does he not? he discovers that his father is not really his father, trust is dead, he has just lost his gold standard, if I may so express it, belief is dead so he says ‘let’s give credit’, and to his friends he offers an exchange, it’s a brilliant idea, now don’t say it isn’t, I do realise that you aren’t an economist but you’ve said something quite new that we could act on today.