Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

In receiving the accolade, Abd el-Krim must kiss his shoulder, no, no kiss, which would you prefer? a man who pretends to kiss the hand and will keep his word? Or another man who will lick the back of the hand, the palm of the hand, the other hand and afterwards hatches some underhand plot? Lyautey was seriously tempted to allow Abd el-Krim to become firmly established, so as to boot the Spaniards out of Morocco, teach them a lesson for staying neutral in 1914, the sky was bluer, more intense than in Asia today, fewer clouds, a scent of orange trees and just as much of a shambles, colonial troops getting a trouncing from peasants who pour down from their mountains, not proper mountains really, one morning the call goes out to the harka, twenty men from the tents of each douar, a couple of douars per lejf, no precise figures, a few leffi per part of a tribe, plus a tribe, it soon adds up to hundreds and thousands of men.

A mass mobilisation, an army of men who have no leaders but know each other, here they come down from the hills, I hang on for dear life, I am overrun, swept along by the rush down a slippery slope, the meat at the Residence was succulent, Lyautey watching his guests feeding off lambs served whole.

His own officers tore off pieces with a light, almost mechanical flick of the wrist, three fingers of the right hand, without looking, choicest morsels must go to the guests, to the chiefs who have come to be honoured or to the Parisians who do not know what to do with the titbits which are set politely down on the rim of the large dish in front of them, red wine is served, to it ice is added, the ladies from Paris laugh very loudly, gorgeous ceremonial tents, the largest for the greatest personages and then lesser groups under progressively more rustic tents, it’s protocol, first the dishes go round to high-ranking officials, next to low-ranking officials, then to their subordinates, and when they have been poked at for the fifth or sixth time they reach the attendants and, finally, the women in the compound at the back.

‘Look at that, a show of breathtaking menace,’ says Max, pointing to a galloping herd of leaden clouds over Singapore, ‘there’s going to be a deluge, dear people.’

‘Not so,’ says Morel, ‘the wind off the sea prevents the clouds from massing, it won’t come to anything much.’

‘And the tree hasn’t stirred,’ adds the Consul.

From a tin of Capstan he has taken two small flakes of tobacco, which he proceeds to rub in his palm before filling the bowl of his pipe with it.

‘Tree?’ asks Morel.

‘That one,’ says the Consul, gesturing to a tree as supple as a large papyrus, ‘when a real storm is brewing it closes up, but it hasn’t stirred, so we’re in the clear.’

‘So come along ladies, play!’ Max orders, ‘since such is the will of the tree!’

Singapore, those were great times, some right, and the rest were wrong, those who had bombers were wrong to drop bombs, and those who kept to the forest, the paddy-fields, the night, were wrong not to negotiate. And those who’d spent forty years trying to understand, that is the English and the French, could play croquet in Singapore as in days of yore and tell each other that at last they’d been proved right.

*

This time it was you who reached the Waldhaus ahead of schedule, you arrived from Paris the day before, you stayed the night in the valley in the village hotel, the Prätschli, and next morning you took the cable car up to the Waldhaus. You are uneasy, you have a premonition, you are sitting by a window and you see Lilstein coming towards you through the lounge, stiff as a poker, moving as awkwardly as a student, he smiles, greets you, rubs his hands together and comes straight out with:

‘They’ve screwed up, young gentleman of France, I know that they’ve taken the decision, they’re going to bomb Vietnam, carpet bombing, Johnson will make the announcement two weeks from now, you can tip the wink to your friend the Minister, it will give him a chance to make a prediction, it will do his reputation no harm!

‘The Americans have fouled up, they can drop as many bombs as they like, it’s a quagmire, they can fight a war from the air, but the more bombs they drop the less they’ll be capable of establishing themselves on the ground, and they’ll go home with their tails between their legs, as your side says, your de Gaulle is right about this, plus the two of us and a few of our friends, we’re working to make reason prevail, reason will cut through this whole mess, but we’ve got to give it a helping hand, like at the time of Cuba, this isn’t espionage, it’s diplomacy, discreet, why so glum? This information is worth a pot of money, they’re going to start bombing in two weeks, all’s well! Let’s just carry on.

‘We’ll need to be cautious, not go too fast, do nothing robust, just look at what we’ve achieved in ten years, you’re no longer a nobody, Cuba, I gave you good information, “the Soviets will withdraw their missiles”, you used it to submit a first-rate analysis of the situation, your friend the Minister liked it, today he is respected and he is grateful to you, not excessively so, he has a talent for forgetting services rendered, but he knows you can be useful to him, he regurgitated your analysis in a full Cabinet, with de Gaulle in the chair, hold firm whatever the cost, be strong, he’s no Gaullist but in a tight corner he’s sound, stand up to Khrushchev, give full backing to the Americans, Khrushchev will withdraw his missiles, you saw the result, we forced death on to the back foot, that’s our only reward, so let’s carry on, with all due humility.

‘Our only reward is the outcome, your friend backed the Americans and he impressed de Gaulle, it must be done, and moreover comrade Nikita, a dangerous amateur, got the chop, nothing drastic, a five-roomed flat in Moscow, not to be sneezed at, and when people in the street ask him how things are, Nikita says, so-so, amateurs get the chop, I’m not sure that between Beria and him we gained much by the change, yes, I recall very clearly hearing you talking about the various deaths of Beria, you have a good memory, three deaths was it? no, at least six, and you are quite right, in the notes the doctor made about my mother’s ravings the name of Beria did not appear.

‘Not once. At first I thought it was the ultimate precaution, we’ll have to come back to that, Beria, a sadist, a psychopath, a man sexually obsessed, the Russians love to frighten themselves by kicking their corpses in the ribs. If the Soviet Union is the kind of country that could be dominated by a man like him, then it isn’t much of a country, or else Beria is much more than a man who ripped the panties off women, just think, Peter the Great died before he became Peter the Great and it was the great nobles took it on themselves to write the story of his life, or take the Emperor Augustus, he died before being Emperor Augustus, and it was Antony who wrote his portrait, Octavius the psychopath, which he most certainly was, like Beria, who was nothing like Augustus, or Iago, picture Iago, it’ll cheer you up.’

Lilstein’s digressions are of course intended to cheer you up and also to impose his ways on you. You’ve decided that you would go on looking grim to make him ask you what was wrong, you’ve thought hard about what you are going to say to him, that you’ve just reread Faust, that it’s not working any more, and then he manages to make you listen again to his anecdotes or fantasies, by the time he’s finished it’ll be too late, he will have taken you by the hand once more, you will want to speak but won’t be able to get the tone right, you’ll sound hesitant or brusque, and appear to be missing the point.