Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

‘The general disappeared, perhaps just as he walked round a bend in a corridor, they’ll explain all that to you one day, the Russians sent another general, a hero of the Soviet Union, twice a hero of the Soviet Union, but this time he was the one nearly wetting his pants in my presence, he’d been at Stalingrad, panzers with hand grenades, he told me he would have attacked them with his bare hands if he’d had to, in the end the guy saw off the Reich’s divisions, temperatures of twenty below, he faced me, a low-grade informer, and nearly wet himself, we became firm friends.’

Why is Lilstein saying all this? these are secrets and you shouldn’t tell secrets unless you are about to trade them for other secrets, but Lilstein has got into his stride, he says that after the business with the first general he hadn’t felt any the better for it, to be perfectly honest, at the time he even considered taking French leave, as they say in England, some of his friends had managed to get away from Rosmar in ’46.

‘Once across the border, they stuck skull-caps on their heads and killed the language of the people who had killed them, they left, young gentleman of France, so that they might become strong once more, by moving rocks around for Ben Gurion, a new Sparta, they succeeded, nobody will ever make them disappear again, why didn’t I leave? Because I can’t stand the heat nor the Middle East, nor messianic missions, not messianic missions of any kind, you’ll see, I’ve become very pragmatic, the Red Dawn, Promised Lands, that sort of thing is so mortiferous, personally I prefer fog, quiet brasseries, boring newspapers, waitresses with long legs, a world without God, and internationalism, but above all I love my mother tongue, I am an internationalist infatuated with his mother tongue.’

Lilstein can’t stand the Middle East but it’s just like being in the Middle East, the talk will go on for hours touching on every subject but carpets, and it will categorically not be about money, in the window no more jackdaws are visible, lower down the mountain isolated chalets can be seen, you imagine another life: the stone sill at the door, at dusk a last cloud over the tree-line, and the hearth, all the resources of the mountain coming benignly together, the gurgle of a brook beneath the snow, a woman in a large woolly jumper, you need silence, Lilstein has caught your eye as it wanders towards the woman with red hair who is now unhurriedly busying herself in the room, he asks you if you think she’s beautiful, yes, at first Lilstein also wanted to kill the language of the people who had killed him, he stayed in Germany but he never spoke German except to give orders:

‘I used to joke in Russian, you have to!’

And as a precaution, Lilstein pretended to have forgotten his French and English, whereas he knows kilometres of poems in several languages, that means he can drive a thousand kilometres reciting poems non-stop or as good as, Shakespeare, Valéry, Baudelaire, Donne, Mandelstam, in particular he knows reams of Goethe, Heine, Rilke and Apollinaire, he’d almost killed all that off too, and then one day a book came his way which he had to read for professional reasons.

‘Some bastard bourgeois scribbler! Listen, this too I know by heart, “German will remain the language of my mind, because I am a Jew, I intend to hold on to all that’s left within me of a devastated country” that’s good … “the fate of its sons is also my fate but I bring an additional legacy”, that is generous, it’s humanist! “I bring!” Now mark well the end: “I want to help the world to feel grateful to them for something”, a double distillation, the catch in the back of the throat, if I were a great, strong Aryan, nothing would make me feel more humiliated than that sort of irony.’

So Lilstein decided he would stay, that he would help, he stayed with them, that is, he stayed at home.

At the time he read that forbidden author in bed at night, he would lie on one side with, against his back, a beautiful woman.

‘It’s wonderful, young comrade, no, too irritating, I can’t go on saying comrade, you’re about to leave the Party, it’s wonderful to read a good book and feel against your back the breasts and legs of a woman who holds you close, her face was sweet and there were the rings of pleasure under her eyes, I did all I could to protect her, she loved me, she whispered in my ear that I took her to unbelievable depths.

‘We liked walking along the beach, she denounced me in 1951, just then it wasn’t a very good idea to be called Lilstein or Meyer, I could stroke her breasts for hours on end, I brought her bunches of irises, and she denounced me, or rather she signed a paper in which she said that I had said this and that and so on.

‘In the Nazi camps I’d seen comrades die who could have obtained a stay of execution by denouncing me, and lo! my very first real woman managed to betray me! Unbelievable depths indeed!

‘They hadn’t even threatened her, they’d asked her questions, they’d dictated her replies, courtroom, men in uniforms, she was a good German citizen, she signed, I discovered everything together, love, Realpolitik, and vaginal follies, to me there are only follies, she denounced me, funny isn’t it? I shed hot tears, but I had done some denouncing too, a general in the Red Army, but I wasn’t sleeping with him at unbelievable depths, and the man who later asked me over and over to denounce myself while he kept turning the endless screw could easily have been one of the group who liberated me from Auschwitz where I hadn’t been denounced, I really thought my number was up, do you know how people died in those times?

‘Pneumonia, obviously, but you also got killed, young gentleman of France, from behind, as you walked along a corridor, never attempt to turn round, otherwise the bullet will shatter the bones in your face and then you can’t be made presentable for the coffin, everyone wants to be present at their own death and they mess it up, you understand, the time I felt most scared was when I was in the corridor, I only breathed again when I got to the interrogation room, you have to do it, what saved me was the death of the Big Man with the moustache which also happened just in time to save the lives of his Jewish doctors from a walk down the corridor, I was much less frightened than they were, I soon realised that for reasons I couldn’t understand they weren’t going to kill me, they sent me to a camp, then the death of the Big Man with the moustache meant that I was released from one of those camps no one talks about.’

Sure, Lilstein saw the girl again, not very long ago, she came to see him in his big office in Berlin.

‘I didn’t feel I had anything to forgive her for, I said it wasn’t anything to do with her, the investigation had been fixed from the start, and it’s always better to be denounced by someone who knows you, there are fewer inconsistencies in the record, and therefore fewer beatings. It is a sweet feeling, having an ex-lover there in front of you torn between fear and remorse, it’s a moment you’ve dreamed of a thousand times and when it happens you sit there and look, ten years on, the woman has not changed much, she is beautiful, deep breaths make her breasts rise, your hands remember her breasts, it’s a very delicious position to be in, but you tell yourself you could have done without the circumstances which have brought it about, and that makes you change your mind as you watch the woman with such feeling.

‘Are you absolutely sure you wouldn’t care for a spot of philosophy, young man? I mean to say: Waltenberg! The famous Seminar, the intelligentsia of Europe reading the last rites over Aufklärung, such a rich word, and in its place proclaiming that we must inhabit the world poetically, go back to the earth, to the Urwald, to the great forest of Authentic Being, while the brownshirts were beginning to occupy the hearts of cities! The earth which does not lie, the forest tall with trees! Still, it was bound to get out, that in the end the tall trees always march in step with the warriors, across the earth that never lies. I was young, the people I loved called me young Lilstein, I liked that, I was sixteen in 1929, I had an older brother who was a philosopher and wanted me to understand it all, very taken he was with the new thought, that is the philosophy of Being, away with your concepts and your Enlightenment! In 1934, the Nazis grabbed him by the hair and beat his head against a kerbstone.