Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

‘Want to give me your piece for one of our papers?’ asks Lilstein.

‘Never!’

‘Max, why not write a biography.’

‘You mean, like Ulbricht’s? Got any unpublished material? On the early thirties?’

‘You wouldn’t fancy a few leads about Beria, would you, Max? It would go down very well, I don’t know much myself but I’ll give you whatever I can find, how you get to be someone like Beria, you set out in life to be an engineer and you end up being Beria, a biography, you could reconstruct a whole slice of history, and you’d tell me everything you found, you’d know the life of Beria inside out.’

They have now emerged from under the trees, the air is cooler, wind from the Rhine.

‘Misha, let’s save time, you tell me now what it is you want me to find on Beria. Are you planning some propaganda job?’

‘No, Max, really, it’s personal.’

‘A woman? Misha, you’re in love with Beria’s wife! Does she live in Berlin? Can you arrange an interview for me?’

‘Max, this is serious, it’s just between the two of us, if you were working on a biography of Beria and you could let me know why and how I managed to survive, how it happened, the son of a German Bolshevik Jewess eliminated in Moscow for Trotskyism who outlives his mother. I survived Auschwitz and Stalin, didn’t get a bullet in the back of the head in ’46 or in ’51, I wonder if the explanation isn’t somewhere close to Beria, at least up until the time of his death, why did Beria let me live?’

‘Maybe because you were like him? Even so, he put you behind bars in 1951, Misha, you have a selective memory.’

‘Surely, but at the start it wasn’t so hard, I mean compared with the Nazis, hours and days on a stool, it didn’t seem like out-and-out torture, they called it the endless screw, the hardest thing to bear about the whole business is that they don’t hit you, if you hurt it’s because it hurts to remain sitting all that time on the edge of a stool, hurts more and more, but you can’t honestly say that these men who are talking to you are hurting you on a level with beating you with a length of hose pipe, that’s the clever bit, you think that if you’re hurting then it’s the fault of your backbone, no way can you use hatred as a way of resisting.’

‘So how did you manage it?’

‘I needed to hate, I kept thinking this doesn’t come from Stalin, nor from Beria, it must come from someone else, that bastard Abakumov, the swine who gets his vengeance in first, Max, I’ll give you a few leads on Abakumov, you must always have someone available to hate, that’s how I never buckled, and because they weren’t trying to destroy me, I could hear other noises in the corridor, it was horrible, but they never did anything like that to me, why?

‘And with my leads, Max, you could write a fine biography of Beria, full of detailed facts, for example their favourite game, when the small inner circle got tanked up with Stalin, at least four times a week, you don’t know what their favourite game was? Everyone played, except the victim, it consisted of putting a tomato on Mikoyan’s chair before he sat down — sometimes they pulled the same stunt on Malenkov — he gets up to go for a leak and they stick a tomato on his chair, he might glance down at his chair just as he is about to sit down, but Stalin chooses that precise moment to shout “Anastasius, what are you plotting these days?” and Anastasius makes very sure he’s looking Stalin straight in the eye.

‘He forgets everything else, and splatt ! goes the tomato, like schoolboys, but no one ever tried it on with Beria, too scared, Stalin wasn’t, but Stalin was never the one who placed the tomato, Beria had too much on him that he could spill, you’d need to stress the serious side of Beria, Max, the way he managed things, you could never stress Beria’s managerial skills enough, you do realise that in the United States he could have been head of IBM or United Fruit?’

‘Yes, that’s good, young Misha, when Stalin dies Beria seeks asylum in the United States, locked up for a few months, many debriefings with the top brass, as there’d been for some Nazis, his abilities as a manager are spotted, turn him loose, but for business purposes only, as to personal preferences he is made to conform, no more teenage girls, not so? Mistresses yes but not underage girls brought in off the street? Even your wife could confirm this? What she says is that she can’t see where you could have found the time, rumours, vulgar rumours? Agreed, but we don’t want any rumours either, if you feel the slightest urge ask Ted, your driver, no, that’s not what I mean, Ted knows the right people, want to make love? Buy it outright. And Beria becomes vice-president of United Fruit, chief of operations, you can forget the rest, exactly the same as with Gehlen or von Braun, that’s the way to do it!’

‘Yes, Max, it surely is, Beria as a Yankee manager, I like it! Beria crazy about development, becomes the world number one in the banana business, and like all world number ones he hates taxes, a five per cent tax is slapped on his bananas by a Guatemalan president, so Beria dines in town, plays golf, poker, maybe with you, and the CIA sets up a military regime in Guatemala to protect his plantations of untaxed bananas, thousands dead, heavy hand of the military, dirtier and dirtier as the years roll by, but no Gulags, just safeguarding free enterprise and top-grade bananas, and Beria, a top-grade manager, keeps his hands clean.

‘A biography, Max! True, false, plausible, you would tell it very well, you’d discover why he protected me, include stories about little girls if you want, help make it sell.’

‘I don’t want,’ says Max.

At Grindisheim at around five in the evening, everyone gathered again around the grave, a thousand people in a semi-circle.

At a sign from the funeral director a man steps up to the microphones, from his pocket he takes a book, opens it, in accordance with the last wishes of our friend I shall now read, in French, a passage from the chapter headed ‘The Picnic’, which is chapter five of the third part of Le Grand Meaulnes, through the gathered crowd runs a ripple not of hostility but of sporadic surprise, merely what happens whenever certain people in a crowd recognise the person who is the object of every gaze and circulate an unexpected name, yes, you can see it’s him, it really is the French Ambassador, not Monsieur Gillet, no, this one’s the French Ambassador at Berne, Monsieur de Vèze, I wasn’t aware they knew each other, it’s odd, a Frenchman reading Le Grand Meaulnes in the middle of a German cemetery, with the president of the Bundestag here, and de Vèze has begun: ‘Everything seemed to have come so perfectly together with a view to making us happy, and yet we have known so little happiness…’

Through de Vèze’s slow, careful delivery is evoked a world of small meadows, grey hills, the baying of hounds and turreted castles … ‘how beautiful the banks of the Cher looked…’ hedges, copses, a lawn … ‘a wide, closely cut lawn where it seemed there was room only for endless games…’ knowing Kappler, old man, I was expecting something more acerbic than this old picture postcard stuff, he traversed the century and he got a Frenchman to read out bits of an adolescent novel, it doesn’t surprise me, you know, there are at least two Kapplers, the man who wrote those virtually unreadable great works between the two wars, crisis of values, crisis of the novel, a martyr to chiaroscuro, and the bestselling author after ’45, the easy turn of phrase, realist transparency, his last period, stories that everyone can read, he even wanted to launch a literature series which rewrote great books in everyday language, they would have been condensed, pruned, he even wanted to do it with Ulysses and The Magic Mountain , I think he’d even have simplified his beloved Grand Meaulnes, tell me, any idea what will happen to French foreign policy now de Gaulle has gone?