Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

All you can do now is hand back your card, Lilstein has just one more thing to ask you, a small thing, and then he will let you depart in peace:

‘Why did you join the Party which you now seem so anxious to leave? Didn’t you know that the Party had done some terrible things long before this latest business in Budapest? In Berlin, not that long ago? In 1936, the show trials? And the “kulaks taken as a class”, were they just a handful of parasites in evening dress as portrayed in some Eisenstein film? Or Cronstadt, a workers’ council, like the one in Budapest, but you must know what the Soviets have always made of workers’ councils, and the Lumpen, there are various books about it, are you an intellectual or a grand Lady Bountiful from some charitable organisation? Do you know by what means, as recently as three years ago, convicted persons were still leaving Moscow for camps — yes, camps — which don’t exist, so it’s hardly surprising that people find it so difficult to come back from them? In bogus refrigerated trucks, there were so many of them roaring through the streets that French journalists wrote glowingly of the abundant supply of butcher’s meat! Fairy stories, the lot of it, one day we’ll come back to them.’

Lilstein’s eyes look larger now than they did a little while ago, his face less pink, the cheekbones more pronounced, you see more clearly the two inwardly curving lines running down from each nostril to the sides of his mouth, they are the lines that come to people who laugh, who consistently use their faces and expressions as pawns in the conversation, the better to impose on the person they’re talking to.

A metre behind Lilstein, in the tall dresser, is a collection of decorated plates, mountains, lakes, goose-girls, old châteaux, group scenes, the late evening light floods through the window and warms the porcelain and the colours which decades of washing have turned pinkish, greenish, pastel-ish.

In the middle of the collection, two rectangular dishes, much bigger than the plates. The one on the left shows women emerging from a house and walking into the foreground in a swirl of snowflakes, severally carrying a lantern, distaff and gun, while in the background a group of men linger by the door holding straps and halters, it is the end of one of those country gatherings at which people would congregate around a ceramic stove and tell stories about the Devil, the lady of the lake or grapes, when the buds swell on the nodes of vine-shoots ravaged by the secateurs, everyone listened, the girls spun and wove their wedding trousseaus, the boys greased the horses’ harness with goose-fat, Lilstein is calmer now, he resumes in a steady voice:

‘At least your father is alive, and you’re not obliged to smile nicely for his murderers.’

Lilstein is going to speak to you at some length, he will mix confidences, philosophy, crude words, the edge of tears, the thoughts of Bukharin, best of the Bolsheviks, the only one capable of coming up with ideas other than the knout and watchtowers, Schubert’s Lieder , ah, you like them too, Fischer-Diskau, yes, but there’s also Hans Hotter, it’s an English company that distributes the recordings, the state of workers’ pay, more Bukharin, the songs of Yves Montand, I particularly like the early Montand despite his legato, Schubert, I must get you to listen to the Winter Journey sung by a woman, rather unusual and quite magnificent, the death of Beria or rather the seven deaths of Beria, at least seven, in the Bolshoi they’re performing The Decembrists by Yuri Shaporin, it’s 27 June 1953, all the Party chiefs are there, Pravda prints all the names except Beria’s, the approach road to the Bolshoi is closed off by tanks for the limousine bringing the comrade first deputy Prime Minister of the USSR and the Minister for State Security, he is shot in the prison of Lefortovo the same evening, the first of his seven deaths.

The second is Khrushchev saying ‘One day Beria came to a meeting without a bodyguard and I killed him’, Beria is the most interesting character of that generation, you shall hear all about him, young gentleman of France, Beria as a skirt-chaser, the guy has a reputation for having women brought forcibly in from the street and raping them in his office, over his desk, Bluebeard. When I was in prison I heard some hair-raising stories about him, a very complicated death.

Then there’s the version by Sergo Beria, his son, ‘my father was killed in his house’ on 26 June.

Lilstein continues to jumble everything up, he drops the deaths of Beria, before he’s done he’ll tell you about the others, they’re even more lurid, he switches to the atomic threat, comes back to his mother, Berlin, January 1919, she stumbled across the corpse of Rosa Luxemburg, he reverts to the atomic threat, back to Clara Zetkin, then something new, the colonial wars, Schubert’s Lieder and his Winter Journey, I know a woman who used to sing it, marvellous, the story of the hunter and the bear, Beria’s frolickings, his wife saying he had mistresses but not all that many, wouldn’t have had the time, I must make time to tell you the story of the bear and the hunter, young gentleman of France, Picasso’s paintings, I’m a noted expert on Guernica, the horse which turns round is fascinating, a whole story complete in itself, have you read the articles Blunt wrote about it, Anthony Blunt?

Lilstein raises his glass and begins to talk about a wide beach on the Baltic, you must be able to trust people with secrets, his life had begun again on a beach, everything had begun on a beach, it was 1948, he’d only just met the young woman, and when I think she denounced me!

He couldn’t say now which of them had suggested the stroll along the shore, the sand and the sea, the desert that was the sea, the spume, the salt, the smell of seaweed, the cry of albatross and petrel, a small, low-roofed house loaned for their picnic, they’d walked for hours, defying the cold wind blowing in off the sea, walked without speaking, the wind stripped them of words, of any desire to speak, losing all sensation except that of a body walking into the wind, a body reduced to the sum of its movements and tears brought on by the cold and the brutal light, confronting spume and wind, walking over sand littered with mussels, sea-shells, seaweed, trident shapes left by the feet of curlews and gulls, seeking out the solid sand at the sea’s edge to walk on as fast as they could to keep warm, they walked to where the sand is already sufficiently loaded with water to be firmer but not yet so saturated that shoes sink into it, just before the line where the wave dies, when its foam is simply froth and seems to be no longer liquid, when it is no more than a fringe of expiring bubbles at the extreme edge of all that water which continues to endure in its seething and rasping surges.

An immense beach, Lilstein tried to position himself so that he sheltered his companion but he was puny, made hardly any difference, even by walking backwards in front of her, he was buffeted by squalls and it was the young woman who, with a laugh, was first to set herself against the wind from the sea, at an angle, she swapped places, to protect him, saying, shouting into the wind, that she could stand up to the wind better than he could and as they changed places they grabbed each other by the shoulders, from time to time they passed little old men who were gathering firewood to warm themselves by, watching this floating plank or that end of a beam which in its own good time the sea would fling on to the beach, but it was that or nothing, sometimes there was more than one old man following the same piece of wreckage, they eyed each other warily and seemed relieved that Lilstein and the young woman did not represent youthful competition, and looked at them the way you’d expect them to look at people who did not need to rescue driftwood from the waves of the sea.