Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

‘They do whatever they want until they get packed off to Yakutsk, I’m afraid she wants to marry a foreigner, it will only end in tears, she went out with an Englishman for a while, don’t laugh, they’re not all queer, or else they change, it will cause a lot of trouble, be nice, go and tell her that in the West men behave as badly to women as we do.

‘Tell her that with an Englishman she’d still have two jobs, her maths plus the shopping, the kids, housework, cooking, just like here, but we won’t be there to look after the children, and anyway she won’t be allowed to go to England, she’ll be sent to Yakutsk, she’ll be forced to have an abortion, personally I don’t give a damn about what happens to me, everyone knows I’m not ambitious, never was, Tukhachevsky taught me all I know, I admired him, they shot him, and it was on that account that I rose through the ranks so quickly, no ambition, because after the war I undertook certain little … undertakings for the good of the state.

‘They can put me out to pasture whenever they want, I’ve always voted with the majority and I’m a hero of the Soviet Republic, I was made a hero of the Soviet Republic twice because when a lot of people get killed the survivors are decorated to honour those who did not, you know, seven and a half million soldiers died in four years, sixty per cent losses, that’s a lot of dead heroes, so they turn the survivors into twice-, thrice-decorated heroes, I am a twice-decorated hero who votes prudently, that is, with the majority, here that sort of attitude is highly respected, I’m not afraid for me but I am afraid for my niece, especially when I won’t be around any more.

‘Go and say rude things about Westerners, tovarich, so she falls into line, as you people say, and blesses us with grand-nephews who are one hundred per cent Russian, I’ll take them skating.

‘You needn’t even bother to go for her, look, she’s coming over here, she knows she’s not allowed to bother officials, but not being allowed to is a challenge for her, ask her to dance, tell her that your lot are just as heartless as our lot and that you don’t know as many poems, no, she’s stopping, it’s the turn of those men to dance now, men in skirts, they’ll dance with each other.

‘See? she’d rather watch men in skirts dancing to that awful caterwauling.’

De Vèze and the Marshal stop talking, they are standing at the front of the spectators a few metres from the group of Scottish soldiers, you can’t have a British ball without the crossed sabres laid on the ground, swords or straight sabres, points touching, and under the chandeliers, four men in pleated skirts and red jackets, hands on hips, they leap rhythmically over the swords, kilts flying to the skirl of bagpipes.

A few spectators exchange smiles, four other groups of four men in each corner are also dancing, but without swords, there must be some pecking order, twenty dancers in all, they are bare-headed, another dozen men are making the music, pipers and drummers, the men playing the drums are wearing black bearskins and golden yellow jackets, it’s a small band with a tall drum-major, the sword dance is more than jumping up and down to music, it’s light, heel, toe, halfturn in mid-air, or entrechats, not proper entrechats, that would be too feminine.

What they’re doing is what soldiers can do when they’re relieved of the burden of combat, their packs have been removed, they could almost be said to dance well; but with drums providing the rhythm, the spectacle keeps its military character, reaching out for the hands of their comrades, forming a harmonious group, even so it’s not exactly Swan Lake, in the end they gather up their swords, amusing to see the face of one soldier who picks up his sword and salutes with it, lips together, jaw clamped shut, veins standing out on his hand and forearm, blade held vertical in front of his eyes, eyes fixed on some distant horizon, they don’t see anyone, they call it ‘a martial air’, it means not looking happy, a woman looks up at the chandelier above the head of the drum-major, de Vèze likes the blaring pipes because in the desert these men had made up the main body of the infantry, and the reinforcements, the bagpipes had played ‘Scotland the Brave’.

‘I’m quite aware, Marshal, that you don’t care for men in skirts, but at El-Alamein they were at the head of the infantry when we broke through Rommel’s lines, the Germans had left an inviting underbelly exposed in the centre which was intended to suck in the Allied armour, but Montgomery steered well clear of it, the armour stayed at home, he dispatched infantry en masse to the German left flank, this plus the wailing of the pipes created an awesome effect. And that night in camp, those lads in kilts performed the same dance, with swords on the ground, I like it a lot, even if they also did the same to us at Waterloo.

‘Anyway, look, they’re going, here comes the waltz! You may well prefer the waltz, Marshal, which featured at the Congress of Vienna, you have reactionary tastes, your niece is coming this way, she walks a little stiffly, a military step, is she really your niece?’

*

And then out of the blue came the second alert, when the boffins in the lab in Paris disclosed the results of their analysis after the long summer holiday. True, all the devices discovered by Berthier in the Embassy in Moscow, all the recorders, dated from the sixties, but some of the soldered joints were much more recent, they’d been done more or less at about the time they were discovered, that is in about the spring of 1978.

They wasted no time.

Six vehicles outside Berthier’s house.

‘He’s in hospital,’ said his wife.

In the intensive care ward, Berthier had become a vegetable, with red, green blue pipes sticking out of him everywhere; a stroke, cause unknown, recovery ruled out.

Berthier’s eyes were blank and staring, this did not prevent some investigators detecting in them the dejection of a man who, after he’d taken everyone else in, had himself been suckered. Others saw something quite different: the elation of a man who had made the ultimate sacrifice.

A traitor. But Berthier had a cast-iron CV, had only his salary coming in and not a penny more, never played politics, parents Catholic, not rich, graduated from military college, just one blot on his school record, he once got a nought in maths, it was when he was studying for the Saint-Cyr entrance exam, he handed in a blank script because he knew the whole class was cheating, wife a Catholic, no mistress, not even a mild flirtation, his sons were Boy Scouts.

They went back and looked some more. Nothing.

Served in a commando unit in Algeria, never had to take prisoners into the woods, never did any of those things that sicken a man and make him want to atone by doing something, anything.

A Gaullist, he’d opposed the putsch in Algeria but hadn’t shopped anyone. After Algeria, he’d gone into counter-espionage, got interested in techniques of transmitting information, he had sailed through every stage of the very thorough vetting process each year, the man was a paragon.

Since his clean-up in Rome, he had been given full authority to sweep diplomatic premises abroad, the only thing they’d come up with was an uncle who admired Maurras and had been saved from the chimneys of Buchenwald by the camp’s communist network, that’s where analysts in the barracks at Mortier reckoned it all started, all his holidays as a boy and a teenager were spent with this uncle in Normandy, no doubt in hearing all about Stalingrad and the great struggle against barbarism in between fishing for trout, collecting mushrooms and setting a few snares, not everyone agreed that what followed started there.