Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

Just a few images remained, the only ones that seemed still to have a meaning, a young woman in tears at the funeral of Rosa Luxemburg, then the young woman found herself in the clinic on the outskirts of Moscow and there unleashed a volley of curses even before she turned herself back into an old, dying woman Yezhov little shit Jdanov arsehole let Yezhov cut Stalin’s head off and then into the blood pumping out, into the blood pumping out at the base of his throat, let him cast the whole decapitated world, a serpent-world, the poster that had so enraged her before the war showing homeland commissar Yezhov, massive in his red uniform, filling the whole right-hand side with his arm pointing out his hand inside a glove, wool or iron no way of telling which, throttling a viper under its chin its head is made of a number of heads belonging to homunculi, the men condemned to death in the thirties, Trotsky the viper’s tail in the shape of a swastika the tiny heads Bukharin Rykov spitting blood squeezed out by Yezhov’s massive gloved hand, tiny heads with big noses thick lips brown hair bloodshot popping eyes as seen also at the time in posters in Berlin or Nuremberg disgraceful at the time she’d only seen the poster, not the big noses.

Whenever Sarah, having nightmares within some episode full of nightmares, began to doubt, she remembers, the beginnings, when she had to tell herself this is a nightmare, it’ll pass, it’s passing, another nightmare, which passes, from nightmare to nightmare people pass, not the nightmares, a mortiferous process which swallows orders in Russian and spits them out again in a variety of foreign languages, those were the words of Clara Zetkin, ‘the meaning and content of the Russian Revolution are being reduced to a set of rules like those of the Pickwick Club’, Clara Zetkin attended the Party conference at Tours, she had spoken in support of the twenty-one conditions, and here she was, talking of a Pickwick-type club, of a mortiferous machine, she died saying ‘through the midnight gloom I look to the future with optimism’, that was in 1933.

Sarah whispering the whisper of her friend Clara Zetkin, and the hospital attendants did not dare go into her room, may Yezhov enter into Stalin and father a monstrous offspring, Beria saying when Yezhov was liquidated I realised that nothing was to be gained by always saying yes to Stalin, Yezhov plunging into the entrails of great Stalin and out of him siring the swastika-tailed heir who shall sit at the head of what the republic of soviets has been turned into, the optimists can go to hell, listen to the laughter of Bukharin, Kamenev and all those who scale the heavens.

Let them all laugh like hanged men who point to the sky with their third foot, let them watch while Stalin dies clubbed to death by Yezhov as they themselves died and may the diminutive Bronstein die a second death along with all those who believed in it all, the innocents who pledged their future to it and into the great receptacle along with the entrails and afterbirth shall go the Orthodox popes who manufactured terror and the rabbis who processed obedience and the men who worshipped organisation, the heroes of labour, the heroes of war, the commissars and the Vlassovs, the same vessel, Tukhachevsky and his fiddle.

May no one ever again sire believers, Nicolas the cretin, the imbecile Tsarina, the incompetent executioners, the innocents who confess, the martyrs who smile, Lenin who laughs, and all bide their time for the succession in the coming days, the child which Stalin held in the photo, the Bouriate girl, daughter of a regional secretary, she broke free from her parents at some reception or other and jumped into the arms of the Grandfather with the moustache, millions of copies of that photo were printed, the little girl with the slightly oriental eyes, behold, peoples of the world, the only union that is not racist!

The little girl wore a beatific smile and the grandfather smiled beneath his cap, the father is executed during the purges of the following year, the mother exiled in the north, and the mother dies of typhoid, though not according to a KGB note found later, the note asks Moscow what shall we do with this woman who most likely knew certain things? and the reply slip is rubber-stamped: ‘For Elimination’.

The little girl was luckier than her father and mother and the great communist philosopher who gave philosophy lessons to the people’s father, I would like, the people’s father told him, to learn all about Hegel, and everything went smoothly, and when the professor reached the dialectic of reason he was dispatched to a camp, Sarah Lilstein hears the voice of her friend Aïno Kuusinen, wife of one of the leaders of the Komintern, said I was invited with my husband Otto, in 1928, Black Sea, a cruise, lovely boat, a small very ordinary cabin, a sailor brings champagne, biscuits, lovely song on the gramophone, ‘Souliko’.

I myself shall serve my guests, says Stalin. We sip our drinks, Stalin replays the record, he drinks, stares at us, laughs, when the Georgian song ends he plays it again, serves another round of drinks, laughs louder and louder, starts to dance, plays the record once more, replays the same song all through the afternoon, it grows less and less lovely, Stalin jigs up and down, he shouts with laughter, he is drunk, from time to time he stands at the ship’s stern, gazes at the water and the wake as it closes up behind the ship, then returns looking bored.

Again he starts jig-jigging to the music of the gramophone and all the while never stops observing us, the Komintern transmitted to the NKVD information given to it by the NKVD, you’ve got it, closed-circuit, Willi Münzenberg has links with Radek, Radek is shot, Münzenberg refuses to return to Moscow, a three-year reprieve, the NKVD finally catches up with him in a forest in France, that’s the story, Stalin is happy, why did we ever allow that drunken Georgian to grow so big?

Why? Because you were bastards, cowards, fools, psychopaths, monsters, devils, that’s the answer you’ll get from the moralists, psychologists and believers, so lump them together with the Orthodox popes, the rabbis, the bastards, the cowards, the commissars, the psychopaths, it’s no use, Stalin already did it, he had the brain of an Orthodox pope, a psychopath and a rabbi, and a commissar too; when they all landed up together at twenty below, each of them given a pick to hack at the permafrost, and among them some were innocent, Sarah tried to do something, no longer out of duty but from the remorse she felt at not having done what now clearly appeared to have been the duty she should have done when everything was already beyond the reach of remorse, or rather she acted not from remorse but because from that time on there could never be anything else, not remorse nor hope, even hope had become something dirty, Thälmann died at Buchenwald and his secretary Werner Hirsch died in the Lubyanka, Sarah spoke and talked and spoke out.

‘So you see, young Frenchman, the worst of it was reading what my mother thought at the end of her life, my mother never betrayed anything or anyone, I don’t think she ever committed a crime but when she stopped and looked back over the road that had been travelled all she saw was a petrified storm, even in Doctor Zhivago , at the end there is no paradise but there is still a desire for it, a hint of “in spite of everything” with the young people who will fall in love, a red scarf tied round their necks, it still reads like a progressive novel, whereas in the good doctor’s notes was a half-century predicated on a paradise to come and it turned my stomach.’

*

That morning, in the Konditorei in the village, Lilstein’s other interview had proved to be very difficult, much more so than his talk with the ‘young gentleman of France’. Kappler had wasted no time and immediately barked at Lilstein: