Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

An American official is talking about the French and the English, these people want to rebuild their empires, they still think it’s 1910, they’ve got to learn, the Soviets had issued an ultimatum, they too could pounce on Alexandria and deal ‘strategically’ with the Franco-British fleet, for the military ‘strategically’ includes nuclear weapons, Puskas has not returned to Hungary, his wife has managed to flee to Austria, she phones him, at night, the Russian Vladimir Kuts has won the 5,000 and 10,000 metres in the Melbourne Olympics, in the 10,000, he makes twenty-three attempts to shake off Pirie, his great rival, twenty-three spurts in a 10,000 metres, the magazine shows him crossing the line but says nothing of the applause, as you turn the pages you find a high percentage of everything that’s been happening these last few weeks but from a rather stomach-turning angle, a point of view that you do not share but which you soon might, you look for details of the deaths of the three militants killed during the fascist demonstrations against the Party in Paris.

You carry the names of the three men in your head, Ferrand, Le Guennec and Beaucourt, less has been said about Beaucourt because he was a member of Force Ouvrière, Le Guennec was wounded in the fascist attack on Party headquarters, on the Wednesday evening, he was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, it was more complicated with Ferrand, he died of his injuries on the Wednesday evening, the same evening as Le Guennec, but with him it was a gun butt, at Montmartre Metro station, a gun butt, that meant the flying squad, at the time Humanité did not distinguish between the three, it just spoke of ‘victims of the fascist riot’ but didn’t say anything else about the flying squad.

Next morning, you are cold, a long walk by yourself around Klosters, bus for Waltenberg in the early afternoon, an hour’s climb up a road which must have been built by the Devil himself, you’ve still got your magazine, you reread it knowing full well that doing so will make you feel sick but you don’t want to see the drop, another walk at the top, you feel tired, you shouldn’t have agreed to this meeting.

*

And at tea-time you are back at the Waldhaus sitting opposite Lilstein, without knowing how or why, and it is now a bit late to ask yourself that, and Lilstein has left you no time to think about your own position, he promised to tell you a tale, and he goes off on endless tangents, like some Oriental story-teller or an alcoholic:

‘With me, young gentleman of France, you won’t be a spectator but a one-hundred-per-cent participant. What you ask your common or garden spy to do is to occupy a place in the sun while remaining a shadow, which is in itself very difficult, but you, you shall do much, much more, you are about to realise an ideal, you will not be simply the eyes or ears which perceive the drama, you will be the actor, you will play the lead in the great scenes.’

The woman with red hair has reappeared in the deserted lounge of the Waldhaus carrying a Linzer Torte on a large plate, she cuts two generous slices and warns that it is still hot, Lilstein thanks her in a quiet voice then carries on, removing his spectacles, an action which makes the look in his eyes childlike, avid.

‘An actor is exactly what I mean! And it gets even better: on occasions you will actually be the author of the drama, you’ll devise the whole thing, I pride myself that I never ever spy on events, I create them, and you’ll reach the stage where you don’t know if you are talking about some incident in which you participated or if you yourself created what you want to talk about, like some very keen scholar, like a creator, the artist of one’s own life, we are going to fight against the warmongers, and in order to do that you are going to become one of them, “a hardliner”, as the Americans say.’

Lilstein stares at his portion of tart but does not touch it.

‘Are you getting the smell of vanilla and cinnamon? It’s so faint as to be almost undetectable, it’s absolutely essential not to be heavy-handed with these things, I promised you a story? No, I haven’t forgotten, it’s a story which means a great deal to me, it’s the story of my mother, I need time. I’ve already told you that in 1945 the Soviets had put her in a very nice two-roomed flat in Moscow. A fierce militant, starting in 1916, she’d taken up the cause in the days of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, during the pacifist congresses which were staged while the Great War raged around them, women could circulate more easily than men, does that ring any bells? An ardent militant and a brilliant doctor, she knew a lot of people, she was widely respected, two rooms all to herself in Moscow in 1945 was quite something, when I was recalled to Moscow after my little trip to Kazakhstan, I was so pleased to see her again, she showed me round Moscow, then I started to get very busy.

‘Moscow! I’d dreamed of it all through my youth, the future was already there, and I was made welcome, a few months of specialised training, then I was sent back to my own country, to my home town on the shores of the Baltic, I said goodbye to my mother and left for Rosmar, fog, dockside cranes, a handsome sea front and a quite superb brandy, finished your tea? Shall we order a small brandy apiece? No? The French don’t really much care for brandy. Never been to Rosmar? One day I’ll take you there and you can taste our brandy, ein Kümmel , two salmon on the label, double distillation, forty-five degrees of pleasure and guile, flecks of gold in a flaxen robe, but no vulgar overtones.

Lilstein can wait no longer, he cuts a small piece of tart with his dessert fork, blows on it gently and consumes it slowly.

‘It’s still too hot, it doesn’t burn the mouth but it’s still too hot for you to get the full benefit of the aromas, when I was a boy, at Rosmar, I was always too impatient to wait for the tart to cool sufficiently, I really must take you to Rosmar, we’ve rebuilt everything, excellent, sometimes I wonder how we did it because at the end of the war the only people still there were the halt, the hand-wringers and the thieves.

‘Look, isn’t that superb? the lattice on the tart, it gives the design added strength, it holds the jam, and it’s not absolutely regular, that’s important, you should never forget to have enough scraps of short pastry left over to make the lattice for the tart. The day I got back to Rosmar, a Russian general sent for me, in his office there were shelves, thousands of index cards, not all of them recent, he loved flicking through them himself, out of the window you looked down on the world, 1947, let battle commence, Rosmar!

‘But let’s not get carried away, I was pissing my pants as I stood before the general, those were days when it was more useful to have been an officer in the Wehrmacht than a communist in one of Hitler’s camps, some memories are hard to live with, his office stank of orthodox pigsty, my Russian said “that lot need a boot up the arse!” His referring to the people of my home town as “that lot” presented me with a problem, if I also called them “that lot”, what did that make me? Different? They were the ones who wanted to make me different, they would have even gassed me or similar if that’s what it would have taken, the bastards. I wanted nothing to do with their difference nor with the Russian’s difference, I was working with the breath of the dead blowing down my neck, “a boot up the arse”, I was prepared to do that to the adults, I did it, you soon get sick of doing it, but the children? I wanted something new, “risen from the ruins and with face turned to the future”, to rebuild with the children, and I even put one over on the general.’

Lilstein interrupts himself for a moment to look out of the window, a jackdaw, almost motionless, it is so near that you can make out the yellow of its eyes, it is flying into the wind, it pitches, rolls, adjusts its feathers to counteract the power of the rushing air.