Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

Jacques with a mocking, snide smile:

‘Get that Maurice, what a card, he’s only trying to pick her up,’ then Jacques added with a laugh, as if he were telling a very funny joke, ‘and you can stop sleeping around, or do it with just the one, two at most, like me, but not in Moscow, you’ll end up making enemies, some day you’ll wake up with a great big bullet hole in the back.’

De Vèze did not care for that.

The Foreign Minister has almost stopped drivelling on, de Vèze has more or less understood, he has vaguely registered that he doesn’t disagree, but that’s as far as he’ll go, stay calm, never react when you’re riled, if you do react when you’re riled remember that they’ll have anticipated your reaction, smile disdainfully, show that you’re treating this like a kid’s game in a sandpit, as long as none of this gets in the way of your doing your job, say you’ll complete your mission, the Minister replies, oh we’ve all got a mission, like hell we have, your mission as a minister is given to you by some Lady Piddle, you think you’re Choiseul and Briand rolled into one, and you toddle off to some garret in the Élysée and report to a grey mouse who gives you orders, and you call that a mission, you’ve never known what a mission was, ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’

De Vèze, you lead, Koenig’s orders had a certain panache. The meeting’s over, the Minister stands up, he’s getting a paunch, he tightens his belt a notch, he tries to lighten the atmosphere, he fiddles with his glasses, puts one hand on the plumber’s shoulder and says laddishly:

‘Henri, Colonel Berthier here is fully authorised to act, he could even make you turn out your trouser pockets if he wanted.’

Moron, a whisker away from a smack in the mouth. You didn’t react, you’ve become like them, it’s just like the devious oddball with the big, funny ears, like radar dishes, who’d been right in 1965, in Singapore:

‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’

A large villa on a hill above the Strait of Singapore, a very attractive colonial villa like you get in the novels of Conrad, British Imperial Style, long-fronted, single-storey, façade a series of large dominos made of black and white panels, against a green background of tropical trees, they were in the garden, de Vèze, Poirgade, the joker with big ears, the French Consul at Singapore, his wife, a few guests, they were all waiting for the arrival of a man whom de Vèze had always admired.

You couldn’t really say it had all begun at Singapore, though for de Vèze Singapore was beginning to have a portentous feel to it, but he also remembers something else that was said that evening, a comment aimed at Scapin, he of the big ears, by another guest, he couldn’t say which now, it was intended to provoke, maybe it was Poirgade:

‘No, not altogether buggered, just not a sure bet any more.’

*

Once again you’ve made the journey from Paris to the Waldhaus to meet up with Lilstein. A great many things have changed since you were a young Parisian making your first trip in 1956 and especially since the later one: in 1972 you became the general secretary of the annual Waltenberg Forum which welcomed you as a French intellectual, a Cartesian and Pyrrhonist who could be relied on to make the intellectual fur fly.

The Forum was a prestigious meeting of thinkers, politicians, top businessmen and economists. On the lines of what had already been done here in the inter-war years, the focus was on finding a principle of action, on being absolutely modern, you are accused of‘giving your allegiance to capitalism’, you say it’s quite true, and you proceed to defend capitalism.

In all this the crucial thing is to remember that in order to come here you no longer need to pretend to go to Lucerne or Zurich and then at the last moment take some meandering mountain railway so that you can meet up with Lilstein, you now have an excellent reason for making the trip: nowadays it’s Lilstein who comes to meet you, he’s the one who takes as many precautions as that fictional master-criminal Fantômas. Berlin, Warsaw, Stockholm, Brussels, Strasbourg, Basle.

He puts it about that he’s a cousin of the hôtelière, from Alsace, he always gives the impression of being up to something louche, as if he were her lover, he’s fatter, he has a beard, looks older, eventually he admitted that his father was a theatre director, very well known in the twenties, it makes you laugh every trip, it’s an age since you met in the great lounge, you each have your habits, the privileges of the old and valued customer, the hôtelière was considerate enough to take a few of the painted plates you like from the dresser and hang them on the walls of the suite which she now keeps permanently for you, the two big ones in particular, on the phone Lilstein says:

‘Ready or not I’m coming, young gentleman of France!’

You are twenty years older than when he first called you that, but he often still does. Now he bursts through a trap-door in the wall of your cupboard laughing, holding two helpings of Linzer on a plate.

‘I come from the lower depths, from the bowels of the earth, like Punch but without the stick, like Harlequin, and I come bearing the best tart in the world.’

You laugh with him, he looks around your suite and adds:

‘These are what we call “conspiring rooms”.’

You laugh when Lilstein laughs but today you’ve started to feel scared, Paris is making big waves, you’ve even been told that de Vèze, the Ambassador, was being watched, you don’t mind that, but you do wonder if this time there mightn’t be someone taking an interest in you, you’d rather like to stay at Waltenberg, Switzerland does not extradite, still perhaps not, what would it amount to, spending your last years at the Waldhaus stuck between the spectacle of the Grisons and a view of a couple of painted plates? You watch the man with the slow movements who has just sat down facing you, it’s Lilstein of course, but each time you see him again he strikes you first as the man with the slow movements, it takes you a moment before you get his name firmly placed again, you can’t be afraid in this superb suite at the Waldhaus, it’s not possible, you begin to calm down and Lilstein looks at you with a weary smile:

‘Do you realise it’s the twenty-second anniversary of our first meeting?’

You say what’s an anniversary to me, add that you are more and more uncomfortable in Paris where you feel you’re suffocating, you have this sense that a huge net has been cast and that you are about to be trapped in it, you can’t feel anything yet but you are quite sure you’re caught up in it, and all Lilstein has to say is:

‘Jesters doing somersaults, it’s the bells on their hats!’

Elsewhere whole networks are collapsing, large numbers of Soviets are going over to the West, as are some people from the GDR, not that many, but the ones who defect have a great deal to say, too much for your liking, and Germans are obsessed with index-cards and archives. If just one of Lilstein’s archivists took a fancy to visit the Americans or merely his cousins in Bonn, your goose would be cooked.

‘Quite,’ says Lilstein, ‘but we mustn’t let that allow our Linzer to get cold, the only thing I’m certain of these days is that this is the twenty-second anniversary of our first meeting and that we’re eating Linzer, not Sacher, praise the Lord! You don’t know what the Sacher variety is?

‘Sacher Torte is quite different, my boy, a Genoese pastry, a totally fraudulent reputation, chocolate and apricot jam, it’s soft, gooey, whenever I’ve had to swallow a mouthful I’ve felt it had already been chewed by someone else, whereas this Linzer is as exceptional as ever, the jam is unctuous, the shortcrust pastry fights back exquisitely, as ever, and this time it again exudes a whiff of rum, do you remember? The hotelier’s wife added rum once before, a long time ago, it doesn’t make us any younger, did it never occur to you to wonder why, you might have guessed, do you want to know now? Think, it’s simple, rum, a liquid, that means that the cook didn’t use raw yolks but the yolks of hard-boiled eggs.