Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

‘What have you two got that you want to say to me?’

‘We’ve got nothing to ask, Senator.’

‘What the hell are we doing here, then?’

‘We come with a simple message,’ says Walker, ‘a message from the President, you are about to call a lady, please, let me finish, there’s not much to say, the President says: “Don’t”.’

‘Or else?’

‘With all due respect, sir, the President told us to kick your ass.’ And Garrick adds:

‘Until you stop liking it, Senator.’

No one has talked like that to McCarthy in a long, long while, and the two envoys are cool, provoking, the Chairman of the Committee on UnAmerican Activities lays one hand on his aide’s forearm to calm him down, McCarthy is a good card-player, he started too fast, he’s going to kill these two sons-of-bitches and do it without putting a foot wrong. They watch him, smiling, the blood has not risen to their faces which are not pale either, maybe they’re not complete drag-asses, but they’re pretty young, a Republican and a Democrat, here they are together, McCarthy should have made sure he was better informed, maybe they’re not fairies, take care when you order them dead, he checks them out with a smile:

‘You boys served in the war?’

‘Yes, Senator.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Korea, Senator, in the marines both, volunteers’ — this is Walker talking — ‘a good outfit.’

‘Yeah? What did you do?’

‘Flame-thrower, Senator, for a year and a half, I wouldn’t have changed places for the world, and Garrick here was a specialist sharpshooter, his job was to look out for my butt, he did it for a year and a half too, I’m a Republican, he’s a Democrat, we got on like good buddies, and we still do.’

‘You did say: kick his ass?’

‘Until he stops liking it, Senator, it’s army talk, an image.’

‘And what if I shoved my glass in your goddam face?’

‘Senator, President Eisenhower said “or else it’s total war”. It’ll only last forty-eight hours at most. Would you let me expand briefly, before you throw the glass? Actors, intellectuals, union bosses, writers, journalists, you can do pretty much what you want with them, foreigners too, have Thomas Mann dealt with as a communist, order The Magic Mountain removed from US cultural centres abroad, you can go further, tickle up Mr Dulles and the CIA, not too much, got to think of your credibility, all that stuff the President can understand, but when he sends us along to warn you to keep off the grass, keep off the grass is what he means. We don’t like the smell of frying, Senator, but we can handle a fry-pan. This lady is gonna disappear from your plans and this meeting never took place.’

These events of 1954 will be related by Max, Michael Lilstein knows about a third of the story, but on the basis of the third that Lilstein will feed him, plus a few conversations with his friend Linus Mosberger, one of the top men at the Washington Tribune, Max will do something very plausible, he will add the events that took place in Budapest in 1956, and this will be crucial for the way people will remember Lena, the kidnapping, the car, a plausible story.

Which is why, soon, when he speaks to Kappler, Lilstein will not ask:

‘Did you ever see her again?’

And no one’s chin will start to tremble.

The other incident, the one which took place in Hungary last August shortly before Russian tanks rolled into Budapest, just a few weeks ago, Lilstein doesn’t have to tell Kappler about it, he has reconstituted it but he won’t tell the tale of the road, the halt, the forest, the woman with the revolver, she takes Lena to one side, Lena looks up at the sky, the stars and our death are bound by hoops of steel, no, the stars and the cold, what the poet said was the stars and the cold, not death, there’s less pathos put like that, anyway death is there, belle of the ball, I’ve been belle of the ball several times, I’ve nothing to complain about, the forest surrounds Lena, she has always loved the forest, you have the feeling that this one isn’t particularly beautiful, there’s the noise water makes in the grass, the Waltenberg larches, we used to ski on the snow between the larches, with Hans, no not Hans, he didn’t ski, at least not well enough for cross-country runs, and he never really wanted to come with me, it must have been Max who quoted the words of the poet to me, in Paris last year, the skiing was with Michael, young Lilstein, nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan, the first pain I felt, you were the cause of the first pain I felt, and now, dear Michael, I am the one who’s going to die.

It feels so good to enter the forest, the hiss of the skis on the snow, Kägli leads, the monitor, he tries out a new way of braking, a slide with skis aligned, in those days I wasn’t very good at it, that was a quarter of a century ago, the braking action which slowed you from the convergent snowplough to the parallel christiania, hereabouts the forest is not a nice place, I don’t like the dark, it wouldn’t be much better if it were day, at least I don’t have to think that I’m saved by a patch of blue sky, fortunately I don’t have children, a woman with a revolver and a bullet for the heroine.

Not wild enough, all my life I have never been wild enough, the darkness deepens, the Hungarian forest, hurl curses at them like Tosca does, the way they’ll look if I hurl… No, I’ve nothing to say to these people, why don’t they get on with it, I’m only frightened that the woman will make a mess of it, my heart is beating fast, Max did warn me.

The woman with the revolver leaves Lena to be by herself for a moment, brings her back to the car, gives her hot tea to drink, looks into her eyes and says in a muffled voice:

‘It’s going to get very cold.’

A biscuit to go with the tea, again the voice says tonelessly:

‘It’s going to get very cold.’

The hood is placed over Lena’s head again, the car, the long ride, in the end she falls asleep on the shoulder of one of the men. When she wakes, she is alone in the car. She hears voices all around her, American voices. A few minutes later she is in a large ambulance driving towards Vienna, men in white coats and a man in a tweed jacket, a black and orange handkerchief in the breast pocket, her friend Walker, he feels her brow, there are tears in his eyes. A doctor takes Lena’s blood pressure, a syringe.

‘What’s in it?’

‘A heart stimulant, Ma’am, that’s it, no more field service for you.’

So in the end, later that morning, face to face with Kappler, Lilstein will not mention Lena’s name. He’ll just ask:

‘Why are you so set on going back?’

Lilstein remembers Kappler from the days when he was so lucid, he used doubt like a drug. One day, Kappler had said to him:

‘I am a doubter and you are a nay-sayer, that’s the reason why we like arguing, at least for a spell, also because we’re both from Rosmar.’

Lilstein knows Kappler but Kappler knows him even better, they have only run across each other two or three times since 1929, and then only briefly, but what happened all that time ago at Waltenberg has bound them together. Kappler is Lilstein’s big older brother, he has a smile that makes him Lilstein’s superior, it always will, he’ll have no bother winkling out from beneath Lilstein’s current demeanour old traces of the pre-war adolescent, the endless discussions they had in those evenings, in the Waldhaus, in one corner of the main residents’ lounge.

They had their regular place by a window, near a very tall papyrus, a horticultural miracle in a pot at this altitude of 1,700 metres. Kappler always treated the young man as an equal, he would order two coffees and two Armagnacs, you look a lot older than your age, young Lilstein, and you don’t smoke, which is a sign of self-control, but this will be your one and only Armagnac for this evening, are we agreed? Does Kappler remember everything that I can’t even remember myself? I don’t drink Armagnac any more, just coffee, did I take it with sugar in those days? nowadays it’s one lump in the cup and the other in the spoon to dunk in the coffee, what the French call a canard, and if there’s a third lump I leave it or treat myself to another canard, I never put two in the cup, or only rarely, and it’s a bad idea, it makes me feel slightly nauseous, Kappler was already one of the world’s great figures and — apart from the Armagnac — he treated an adolescent as an equal in furious arguments about ideas, he never took sugar with his coffee, he dipped his sugar lumps in the Armagnac, he had no children of his own.