Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

His face goes slack, he asks if there’s anything you still believe in.

‘Because speaking for myself,’ he says, ‘I’ve had it up to here with them, our dogs of war have got the mange, I really feel like retiring, we’d leave the key under the door, you could stay on in your capacity as an organiser of this world forum, that would give you an influential role of your own if, that is, acting as doorman for a great banker ranks as an influential role, it’s not really funny, only now am I beginning to understand what a German or Austrian aristocrat must have felt in 1918, or a revolutionary in 1935 around the time of the Moscow show trials, end of a world, a new world dawning in which there isn’t a place for you, think I’m being morbid? So tell me instead how you’re getting on these days with that female, Chagrin, aka Lady Piddle, it’ll do us good to talk about something else.’

A few years back, there’d been a lively exchange of views about this woman between Lilstein and yourself when she began rising up through the ranks of the President’s inner circle at the Élysée, you thought the safest thing was to handle her with kid gloves, talk things over with her, but Lilstein had disagreed.

‘Make her curious, she has to suspect you, all the suspicions she had at the start will turn out in the end to be your salvation, I’ve always said it: don’t try to be purer than the average man in the street.’

You disagreed with Lilstein, you told him he had no idea what the atmosphere inside the Élysée was like, and in the end you agreed to temporise, nor were you ever one of those who systematically called her Lady Piddle, furthermore you were never part of the President’s inner circle, you don’t work for him, you’re an after-hours visitor, an unofficial adviser, wondrously rambling discussions about culture, politics, strategy, you never hesitate to ruffle his feathers, Chagrin was always trying to arrange to bump into you in the corridors completely as it were by chance, what she got was your cold shoulder.

‘Always remember, young gentleman of France,’ Lilstein had said, ‘to be contemptuous, people like her can never be put in their place too often.’

One day the President himself told you that you should have a talk now and then with Chagrin, she’d like that, you could have said nothing but you said you found her irritating, that you didn’t much care for ostentatiously virtuous people who are anything but virtuous. The President laughed.

And then Chagrin turned on you, it was in the President’s antechamber, a room which preceded the Antechamber proper, Chagrin came in just as you were leaving, she’d arranged it deliberately, or maybe she hadn’t, in any case she was sufficiently near the President’s office for you to be unambiguously reminded of her importance but sufficiently distant for her to attack you, and savage you she did, the President must have had a word with her about your irritation , she attacked you although two security men were on duty in the room, Chagrin’s words weren’t meant for them, but they heard you being bawled out like some minion, Chagrin had a lot of pull, she was feared.

She marched further into the room holding a file, she stopped when she got to you and snarled:

‘Why are you always so condescending when you talk to me?’

Chin thrust forward, and Chagrin had a lot of chin to thrust, you could have said ‘Who, me?’ and protested your finest feelings, instead of which you did something much more incisive, you looked at her with a smile on your face, she assumed she was being offered the hand of friendship, and more than friendship, but you said something to her you would not have dreamed yourself capable of saying, even now you have no idea where it came from, as though there was another person who had always lived alongside you without ever saying a word and all of a sudden, with this increasingly powerful woman standing in front of you, came out with a sequence of unexpected, unforeseeable words which went straight to the heart of everything Chagrin held most dear and revealed to you a self you’d never suspected of containing such violence, you said to her:

‘Because you’re a spiteful slag.’

It wasn’t too loud, nor said in anger, ‘slag’, but suddenly you remembered, that word had made life difficult for you once before, you’d forgotten, your wife had never forgiven you, she’d made you look a fool but you had made the biggest blunder by insulting her, your lawyer said that you’d spoken the word just once, your wife’s lawyer pointed out to the judge, who was a woman, that his client had obviously lived for years with a man who had turned the word ‘slag’ round and round in his mouth without daring to say it out loud.

You’d so completely forgotten such violence that you’d stopped believing you could ever be capable of such a thing, it had cost you a divorce and now you’d flung the forbidden word in Chagrin’s face with sufficient force that the two duty security men jumped and suddenly became part of the scene, so that Chagrin was both disconcerted that there should have been witnesses and immediately struck by the thought that now she had you, because you had just committed an irredeemable act.

You don’t tell Lilstein about this episode because you have the feeling that you’ve just screwed everything up completely, twenty years down the tubes, and all for just one word, just as it was with your wife, all you say to Lilstein is that you get on very badly with Chagrin, which is actually what he’d asked, Lilstein changes the subject, bemoans the demise of the Gemütlichkeit which used to characterise Waltenberg and speaks once more of the old man of Moscow who is such a worry to him. He says that these days even success has a bitter taste.

‘My greatest success was my greatest failure, it was the Haupt affair, everything the papers said was broadly speaking true, I’d succeeded in placing someone in the entourage of Chancellor Haupt, a direct line to the top, just like you, but even more focused, every confidential note passed through his hands, that’s right, it was his secretary, Eisler.

‘There was nothing for me to do, except see him when I needed to, or I would send someone instead of me, it was actually embarrassing to have so much reliable intelligence, we spent more time concealing what we knew than ferreting for things we would have needed to know if our man hadn’t been in position. I tried to protect him, but he laid golden eggs, they made me work him as hard as I could, that’s where it all went catastrophically wrong, Eisler was blown and when he went he also brought down Haupt who was the only German to have a clear vision of what Germany would turn into, we’d been protecting Haupt for a very long time, he was a genuine social democrat, an enemy, but of the highest calibre.

‘When he was almost unseated by the right in the Bundestag, I bought two Christian-Democrat MPs, closed ballot, Haupt was expecting to lose, he was so surprised that he remained in his seat while the Bundestag rose, well at least his friends did, to give him a standing ovation, he was out for the count. That time I saved his skin.

‘But only to bring him down later with a bump because we had a mole who was too good! That’s why I always went carefully with you, young gentleman of France, I’ve kept you all to myself, I don’t even tell the mirror in my bathroom about you, no other contact except me, and that only the strict minimum. From a technical point of view, the downfall of Willi Haupt didn’t make life at all difficult, we had other sources, but something had been lost, which included our appetite for what we were doing.’

Haupt, Chagrin, the jokers, the feeling of disgust, it hardly made for the merriest evening you’ve spent with Lilstein. The next morning, he had disappeared.